LIMS & WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT

The Core develops and supports Lab Information Management Systems.

The Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) is a specimen tracking system designed specifically to meet the immediate, inventory-style tracking needs of multiple health research projects. It provides centralized sample tracking for multiple core facilities at the Cancer Center and other parts of UNC including the School of Public Health.


Through LIMS, labs are able to manage freezer inventory, process samples through project specific or generic workflows, seamlessly transfer samples from one core facility to another, print labels, track samples that are dropped-off, and view an audit history of everything that happened to a particular sample. The LIMS is also integrated with other applications such as Pentaho for report generation. Integration with the Central Patient Registry (CPR) in the Tissue Procurement LIMS allows Lineberger researchers to connect patients with samples.

With the support of UCRF, other workflows were developed and integrated with LIMS to track samples through multiple labs from tissue procurement, processing, sequencing, and data analysis. These functions allow LIMS to manage samples for several large projects including TCGA, UNCSeq, CBCS3, and Health Registry. LIMS currently tracks over 1 million samples, and is being used in seven core facilities at UNC.