A case study on the proper use of human tissues for biomedical research at an academic pathology institution in Switzerland.

Any academic pathologist will sooner or later be confronted with the need to use human tissues for quality control purposes or for research projects or else with the demand for human tissue samples for research projects of external researchers. Over the last 10 years, the use of human tissues for such non-diagnostic purposes has been the subject of extensive debate and wide-reaching regulations. In particular, questions of medical secrecy, safety, autonomy and anonymization have been addressed, and the role of ethical review boards defined. However, these guidelines are not uniform in all countries and unfortunately tend to suffer from a certain lack of precision, which may in part be due to the fact that they are usually edited by multiple authors with quite diverse backgrounds (physicians, lawyers, ethicists, philosophers, anthropologists, theologists or lay persons, for example). The wide spectrum of interpretations of such regulations may be embarrassing to such an extent that a continuation of academic activities with human tissues appears to many pathologists as almost impossible or even outright illegal. This paper describes a set of characteristic, recurrent situations to which an academic pathologist may be confronted and proposes simple, realistic solutions that are nevertheless in line with most current regulations.