Calculator for the costs of using biological samples

A comprehensive and easy to use tool that captures annual expenses, resources, and biospecimen accrual and calculates the appropriate user fees.

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Understanding the internal cost structures and external economic factors that influence your biobank is essential for maintaining long term sustainability. Knowing how to incorporate these complex variables into a fee structure for biospecimen users can be difficult. Factors influencing user costs include the internal biobank capital and operating activities, increasing demand creating a competitive market, and moral standards that dictate that costs should have an ethical basis. It is therefore important to establish a transparent, reliable and accurate costing model that can be utilized by biobanks.

We have developed a User Fee Calculator to help biobanks calculate appropriate user fees to help sustain their operations, and maintain the supply of quality biospecimens for translational research. This online tool helps biobanks model their costs and calculate user fees. It incorporates the concepts of biobank activity, classification, and development phase. You will need to input data related to your biospecimen accrual and release activities in 2 phases:

Input:
Part of Phase 1 in the calculator
Part of Phase 2 in the calculator
Output:

At this time our Biospecimen User Fee Calculator is focused on poly-user biobanks. This tool can also be adapted for used by mono and oligo users biobanks


List of items considered by the calculator:

Expenses/Services
Equipment
Salaries - number of personnel and their salaries

Infrastructure cost - utilities, building rentals

Biobank Accruals
Service Cost
Additional Fees