Communication and Control

Asuragen recognizes that you surrender custody and direct access to your project when you send your samples out for analysis. We work diligently to maintain communication with our clients throughout their projects and always consult with clients on any decisions required during processing. We can provide recommendations based on our experience, but control always rests with the client.

Communication: What to expect

Strong communication starts with a client’s first contact. You should expect to have your initial inquiry and all subsequent questions answered promptly and completely. Our Account Executives and Project Managers are well trained and draw on our operations and informatics staffs as required; ensuring your quotation and Statement of Work accurately reflect your experimental design and requirements.

When you send in samples, our Project Managers become the primary point-of-contact. You will receive notification upon receipt of your samples. We notify you if there are any deviations between your Sample Submission Form and contents we receive, or if there are any issues with the physical condition of the samples, such as the temperature or package integrity. We will provide photos of anything we consider abnormal.

As your samples move through our workflows, we contact you within hours if any quality control measurements fall outside industry-accepted thresholds. We will always present the available options; we can help you navigate tradeoffs in cost, experimental design, and availability of samples.

You will receive a notification when your job is shipped or available for download. If your project includes data analysis at Asuragen, one of our bioinformatics analysts will call you the day of shipment to set up a time to review your data and results.

Control: What to expect

Asuragen’s standardized processes give you the assurance that your data quality will be excellent. However, in the event that a quality control parameter is outside the expected limits, we do not make decisions that affect your samples without your input. In many studies, particularly multi-site clinical studies, sample quality can be highly variable. Depending on your experimental design, this may compromise the entire study. So when we have a concern about a QC parameter, we contact you to advise you about that parameter, what it could mean to your study, and what your options are. You control the decision.

Asuragen’s quality control thresholds generally have two levels:

  • ALERT – meaning that there is a chance data quality may be compromised and
  • FAIL – meaning that data quality will almost certainly be compromised.

These measures are context-dependent. For example, our ALERT level for RNA integrity score (RIN) for Affymetrix gene expression profiling is 7.O. We will contact you before we proceed further if the RIN value of any of your samples is below this level. However, in the case of FFPE RNA profiling, RNA is fragmented almost immediately in the fixation process – RIN values rarely exceed 2.0 for FFPE-derived RNA. Therefore, samples derived from FFPE tissues will not be flagged (or even tested) based on their RIN value.

Finally, Asuragen appreciates that there may be studies in which even industry accepted standards may not be appropriate. By creating a custom Statement of Work, Asuragen can accommodate custom requests for additional QC, alternate thresholds for ALERT or FAIL, and a variety of other points of control in our workflows.