For twenty-seven years the National Disease Research Interchange (NDRI) has been the premier source of human specimens for biomedical research. Funded in part by NIH, NDRI is a 501(c)3, not-for-profit organization that places around 20,000 biospecimens annually with researchers in academic and government labs, as well as those in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries.

NDRI works with organ procurement organizations, eye banks, tissue banks and major medical centers in the United States to provide investigators with a wide variety of diseased and normal human tissues.

NDRI has developed several unique programs, for example to serve researchers studying rare diseases, HIV and viral hepatitis. We specialize in the provision of bone marrow and cord blood (including a variety of stem cells derived from these tissues), and isolated human pancreatic islet cells. Importantly, NDRI has developed mechanisms to aseptically obtain tissues with a very short death to preservation interval (PMI), making them ideal for cell culture, genomic and proteomic research.

Although NDRI specializes in customized procurements to meet your exact needs, a number of specimens are available via the online biospecimen catalog (http://www.ndriresource.org/Biospecimens_Programs/Biospecimen_Catalog/135/). These include a wide variety of rare disease tissues and those procured with a short PMI. Also, in addition to human tissues, NDRI's Genetic Division has an extensive collection of DNA and Cell Cultures from families affected by type 1 diabetes and related disorders.  

NDRI’s OBC (online biospecimen catalog) contains thousands of tissues, DNA and cell lines from donors with various rare diseases suitable for many types of studies including mutational analysis. In addition, we have a wide variety of recovered normal tissues, and snap frozen tissues with low postmortem interval (between 2 and 6 hours post mortem). Full donor information accompanies most specimens. Please login to browse at www.ndriobc.org/, and order those tissues which meet your needs. 


Please visit http://www.ndriresource.org or call 800-222-6374 to learn how NDRI can be a valuable resource for your research. To apply to receive tissues please visit http://www.inspiritec.org/smartapp/.