IPPOSI

Recently voted by TIME magazine as one of the “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now”, Biobanks or Biobanking is thought of as a safe house for tissue samples, tumor cells, DNA and blood — that can be used for research into new treatments for diseases.

Biobanks are infrastructures holding key resources for:

● unravelling the molecular basis of disease subtypes

● identification of new targets for therapy

● reduction of attrition in drug discovery and development.

Europe leads the world in biobanking. According to Nature magazine, it has more than 400 biobanks, some involving samples from hundreds of thousands of diseased and healthy individuals. However the diversity and lack of standardisation of these biobanks and the differing ethical and legal landscape across Europe have impeded their coordinated use. Since 2008, the European Commission has funded a preparatory study, the Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (BBMRI), aimed at bringing cohesion to the European biobanking community and to make existing and new high quality biological resources available for health research in Europe.

The BBMRI preparatory phase (2008-2010), which is funded within framework programme 7 (FP7), aims to provide the basis for the actual operational biobanking infrastructure and plans to provide a strategy and structure for aspects such as access rules and an ethical and legal framework in an effort to permit appropriate sharing of data and samples to maximize the potential healthcare gain. The major impact of BBMRI in the longer term will be the promotion of public health in the EU and the reduction in the burden of complex and rare diseases. BBMRI will speed up development of personalised medicine and will reduce some of the bottlenecks in drug discovery and development.

For more information on BBMRI, click here