Ontario Tumour Bank
Overview
The Ontario Tumour Bank (OTB) is one of North America’s largest biobanks, delivering high quality, clinically annotated biospecimens that accelerate cancer research and fuel the development of next generation diagnostics and therapies. Since 2004, OTB has supported high impact studies by collecting and providing the biospecimens and data researchers need to drive discovery and innovation.
OTB operates across four state of the art hospitals and cancer centers in Ontario: The Ottawa Hospital, London Health Sciences Centre, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, and Unity Health Toronto. In close collaboration with local pathologists, oncologists, surgeons, and hospital teams, OTB’s specially trained staff obtain informed consent, collect tissue and blood biospecimens, and curate comprehensive clinical data. All activities follow rigorous ethical, regulatory, and quality standards, ensuring researchers receive biospecimens they can trust.
At The Ottawa Hospital, OTB is integrated into the Global Tissue Consenting and Collecting Program (GTC), an innovative platform that streamlines patient approach, consent, and enrollment in research. By leveraging GTC, OTB gains expanded access to high quality, ethically collected cancer biospecimens from a broad and diverse patient population, enabling timely delivery of well annotated tissue and blood biospecimens that drive impactful advances in cancer detection, treatment, and precision medicine.
Biospecimen, Data and Service Offerings
OTB collects biospecimens and data from adults with cancer across more than 30 disease sites, including breast, colorectal, lung, ovarian, prostate, and renal cancers, building a robust resource that supports both discovery and translational research.
Our collection includes over 175,000 biospecimens and derivatives from more than 22,000 participants. Examples include:
- Frozen and FFPE tumour tissue
- Matched normal adjacent tissue
- Plasma
- Buffy coat
- Peripheral blood fractions
- DNA
- RNA
- Tissue microarrays
- Digital H&E whole-slide images (more than 15,000) for AI model development
All biospecimens are linked to rich, longitudinal, de identified clinical data, including histology, staging/grading, treatment information, and outcomes for up to five years. For studies requiring fresh tissue or blood, OTB also offers custom prospective collections tailored to your project’s needs. Additional processing services are available through OICR’s Collaborative Research Resources. Access fees are subsidized for Canadian academic researchers. Learn more at the Ontario Tumour Bank website.
Meet the OTB team at The Ottawa Hospital
Harman Sekhon
Principal Investigator, Ontario Tumour Bank
James Villeneuve
Co-Principal Investigator, Ontario Tumour Bank
Amela Koco
OTB coordinator at OHRI
OTB is a program of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), funded by the Government of Ontario. OICR is a collaborative, not-for-profit research institute that conducts and enables high-impact translational cancer research to accelerate discoveries for patients worldwide while maximizing economic benefits for Ontario.
OTB is a founding member of Ontario Biobanks, a collaborative network of biobanks that advances global cancer research by streamlining researcher access to high-quality biospecimens and data across institutions.
