Withdrawn study - The in-depth preliminary analysis of the proposed study on the cost of human body material retrieval revealed several limitations, including a lack of data to assess the scale of a possible issue, a workload far greater than our usual projects and doubts as to the level of quality that could be achieved in this study (e.g. because of the limited number of tissue banks and the variability of their internal organisation, but also because it might prove difficult to establish which costs need to be included in the price of human body material and which are covered by other sources of financing).
For all these reasons, we believe that such a study would extend well beyond the one-year timeframe set out in our project selection criteria, and that we may not be able to make valid and robust recommendations regarding the funding of human body material. The new European directive on substances of human origin (SoHO) is also likely to have an impact on practice, which raises questions on the usefulness of a study of this magnitude at this point in time.
