Objectives

SPIDIA, which is built of clinicians, academics and biobanks as well as in vitro pre-analytical diagnostic tool and assay developers, aims at:

Providing official pan-European quality assurance schemes and guidelines

Those documents for the pre-analytical phase of in vitro diagnostics will allow the study of both cell morphology and biomolecules in one sample. Such documents will be based on evidence gathered during ring trials to be performed in order to elucidate problematic steps in pre-analytical procedures with a specific focus on DNA, RNA, protein, and metabolite targets isolated from tissue, tumour, whole blood, serum and plasma samples. In addition, quality assurance biomarker(s) will be discovered to serve as indicators of effective stabilisation or degradation/induction for these samples.

Discovering new diagnostic tools that integrate all pre-analytical steps into 1 or fewer simple step(s)

Those steps will integrate collection, labelling, stabilisation, handling, storage, transport and extraction of the biomolecules.  The ultimate goal for this integrated system is to reproducibly protect the molecular and cellular integrity of samples. This will enable a systems based diagnostics generating reliable data and diagnoses through tissue and tumour morphology (as well as membrane proteins and cell surface markers), biomolecular assays, immunohistochemistry, and staining from one unique sample.

Testing pre-analytical tools to be discovered and procedures for biomarker discovery

The development of pre-analytical tools and procedures and the development of diagnostic assays must not be considered as independent, but as interrelated, developments. As the discovery of biomolecular targets is the first step in the development of a diagnostic assay, applying standardised pre-analytical tools and procedures in such biomarker discovery programs is a unique chance to evaluate the applicability of such procedures and tools.

Spreading of excellence through effective dissemination and knowlegde transfer of the obtained results