Biobanks for future medicine

The use of biospecimens for biomedical research is not a new idea. Many important developments for a better understanding of diseases have been made using patient samples and related data. In former times, this was realized by individual researchers and therefore not under controlled conditions. In early times, patients were not asked for their consent and quality of biosamples and data were assessed applying subjective criteria. This has changed significantly in the past two decades especially in terms of patient consent, ethical approval and data privacy. With respect to quality, it has been extremely difficult to establish clear guidelines due to the great heterogeneity of the downstream applications. Especially in the last decade, the impact and importance of well-defined and well-organized centralized biobank infrastructures was recognized globally and enormous efforts have been undertaken to establish and operate institutional biobanks in many of the medical centers. The most recent development refers to the cooperation of biobanks at different locations. Those biobank networks enable the query for biospecimens and data across biobanks in order to collect sufficient number of samples from small disease subgroups which would not be possible for single sites. To serve this need is of utmost importance as the advances in omics technologies allow a highly sophisticated subdivision of diseases into small molecular subgroups. Moreover, the existence of many disease subgroups, which can be ideally targeted with a tailored treatment, challenges the pharma industry: in order to support the development of personalized treatment options, biobank networks offering well-defined patient samples of high quality and with rich clinical information are becoming essential partners not only in academic research but also for companies developing diagnostic tools or new therapies.