Beyond Acquisition: Quantifying the Annual Carrying Cost of Long-Term Biospecimen Storage

Background

Long-term biospecimen preservation requires sustained institutional investment in storage equipment, energy or cryogen, monitoring, maintenance, and inventory management. Although biobank economics and biospecimen utilization have been examined independently, the recurring direct cost associated with maintaining existing inventories in relation to storage capacity and research utilization remains less well characterized. We introduce Annual Carrying Cost (ACC) as an operational metric for quantifying this continuing institutional investment.