The Sydney Heart Bank: a core facility that goes the extra mile to advance cardiac research

Core facilities are indispensable to modern scientific research. They are laboratories that provide access to specialized equipment and/or services that would not be feasible to develop in individual labs. Services offered by core facilities often do not fall within the scope of regular labs and their funding because they require high-end, expensive equipment and a high level of technical expertise, or are labor intense (e.g., animal care), and are therefore only attainable when shared by multiple labs. As such, core facilities help enable state-of-the-art research by many labs.

The Sydney Heart Bank is an example of a remarkable core facility that has greatly advanced cardiac research. Human samples, especially from critical organs such as the heart, are scarcely available for research, but essential to help translate results from molecular and animal studies to the human physiology (Dos Remedios et al. 2017; Lal et al. 2016). Aside from the sparse availability of human cardiac tissue, it would be challenging for individual labs to create a tissue bank due to the vast amount of administration, manpower, and finances needed. First off, one needs a strong administrative system. Not only does informed consent has to be obtained before any heart can be collected, it is also crucial that each sample receives a unique identifier. The latter is accompanied with detailed documentation of disease condition, gender, age, comorbidities, and treatment regimens and other relevant information that benefits current or future research. Additionally, it is imperative to keep track off which laboratories tissue was distributed to and for which research purpose they were used. Secondly, to guarantee high-quality samples, an optimized workflow has to be established in which the surgical team and the Sydney Heart Bank work closely together to consistently ensure quick and precise organ harvest. This requires significant manpower from the Sydney Heart Bank team, as the tissue has to be processed quickly (it takes no more than 40 min to cryopreserve all samples) and often at the early hours of day (Lal et al. 2015). Thirdly, long-term storage of tissue is costly, and this requires separate funding as common research grant do not cover such expenses.

The Sydney Heart Bank excels in all of the above, but what makes this a truly unique and exceptional core facility is the vision with which Professor Cristobal dos Remedios developed it. Over 30 years ago, Prof. dos Remedios recognized the need for researchers to have access to human cardiac samples obtained from patients with a variety of cardiomyopathies and started a collaboration with Dr. Victor Chang that was the beginning of the Sydney Heart Bank. Ever since, the Sydney Heart Bank has established a valuable collection of over 15,000 samples from about 450 failing human hearts and 120 healthy donor hearts (Dos Remedios et al. 2017). Unlike most core facilities, the Sydney Heart Bank charges no fee for their service. This makes cardiac tissue readily available to any lab interested to conduct cardiac research on human samples. Requests for samples are made in the form of a research proposal that is reviewed by the Board of the Sydney Heart Bank (Lal et al. 2015). As a result, the Sydney Heart Bank provides human cardiac samples to more than 60 research labs worldwide, which are used to study all different aspects of cardiomyopathies ranging from calcium kinetics to sarcomeric protein mechanics and membrane protein function (Li et al. 2019). The commitment of Prof. dos Remedios and his team is further evident from their active engagement with all labs using samples from the Sydney Heart Bank. Cris and his team are always interested to learn results obtained with the samples and are eager to discuss them in the light of other findings from labs using the same samples. Prof. dos Remedios and his team are committed to bettering cardiac research and are going the extra mile to help achieve that.