The Washington University DDRCC's mission is to support and promote digestive disease related research in an efficient and cost effective manner. The Biobank Core was designed to lessen barriers associated with performing human studies to rapidly promote basic and clinical research in human digestive diseases. The Biobank Core functions as both an archival repository of specimens linked with clinical metadata acquired from individuals with digestive diseases and as a program to prospectively enroll patients, collect specimens, process and store specimens, and facilitate downstream high throughput analysis to support DDRCC members' studies. The overarching aim of the Biobank Core is to promote, facilitate, and accelerate basic and clinical-translational observational studies of human digestive disease. Aim 1: Develop and maintain an archival specimen dataset linked with clinical metadata to rapidly support retrospective studies of human digestive disease by DDRCC members. Aim 2: Develop and maintain the infrastructure to support and rapidly and efficiently execute prospective observational studies in human digestive disease by DDRCC members. Aim 3: Develop and maintain the infrastructure to support large observational studies of human digestive disease across multiple institutions throughout the United States. HIGHLIGHTS - Since November 2009, the Biobank Core has expanded and promoted the infrastructure to support observational studies in human digestive disease by 1) establishing and maintaining an open IRB protocol allowing the broad collection and sharing of specimens and clinical data 2) training, and retaining personnel 3) developing pipelines to rapidly obtain quality and high throughput analysis 4) developing protocols to allow specimens and data to be efficiently shared with other institutions 5) enrolling 3900 patients and collecting over 7000 specimens from over 11 digestive related disease categories as of 4/1/2013 collected over 7,000 specimens and their derivatives linked with clinical metadata, performed extensive genotype analysis on over 1,500 patients as of 4/1/2013. We have supported 20 Washington University DDRCC investigators including 30% of the current full members of the DDRCC, with 8 ongoing prospective collections. This has resulted in 39 publications supported by the DDRCC Biobank Core and has led to 13 additional grants (8 from the NIH) submitted and/or obtained with the Biobank's support. We are participating in consortium studies in human gastrointestinal disease involving 8 other institutions throughout the United States.