If you work in a biomedical lab, you should already know how difficult tracking the massive amount of samples you have can be. Your profession serves an important purpose in society and the quality of work you do should reflect that.

By not keeping up on the latest trends in biobanking software, you’re not only hurting your lab’s productivity, but the sick and weary who depend on your good work. Investing in software that is designed to track samples accurately and effectively should be your top priority. Here are three reasons that lab sample tracking is so important to your efforts:

Cancer isn’t going anywhere. One of the most important things your lab may do with the samples you have is helping those with cancer. You need software designed to track samples in an orderly manner to aid in your research. A staggering 14.5 million people with a history of cancer were alive in 2014, and in 2015 an estimated 1.7 new cases will be diagnosed. These people depend on your research to hold on to hope for the future.

There are mind-boggling amounts of samples to track. In the U.S. alone, there were about 300 million tissue samples at the turn of the century, and that number has been increasing by about 20 million a year since then. There is simply too many ways for you to make mistakes to not have a reliable software that is designed to track samples effectively.

Good samples are hard enough to find as it is. In a recent survey of 700 cancer researchers, about 47% claimed they found it difficult to consistently find biobank samples of sufficient quality. This is an alarming number and could be a major hindrance in the fight against cancer. The proper lab management software can lower these percentages and deliver high quality samples to the people who really need them.

There is a good chance your lab’s software is out of date due to the rapidly advancing technology available to biomedical researchers. Make sure you keep up with the most recent software available to you and continue to help save lives every time you go to work.