Biobank

A biobank is a type of biorepository that stores biological samples (usually human) for use in research. Since the late 1990s biobanks have become an important resource in medical research, supporting many types of contemporary research like genomics and personalized medicine.

Biobanks give researchers access to data representing a large number of people. Samples in biobanks and the data derived from those samples can often be used by multiple researchers for cross purpose research studies. For example, many diseases are associated with single-nucleotide polymorphisms, and performing genome-wide association studies using large collections of samples which represent tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals can help to identify disease biomarkers. Many researchers struggled to acquire sufficient samples prior to the advent of biobanks.

Biobanks have provoked questions on privacy, research ethics and medical ethics. While viewpoints on what constitutes appropriate biobank ethics diverge, consensus has been reached that operating biobanks without establishing carefully considered governing principles and policies could be detrimental to communities that participate in biobank programs.

Prior to the late 1990s, scientists collected the biological specimens desired for their experiments themselves, and did not have a particular goal of routinely sharing their specimens with other laboratories. When researching genetic disorders, scientists would only consider genes they already expected to be associated with that disorder—only looking for mutations in BRCA 1 or BRCA 2 for breast cancer, for example.

By the late 1990s scientists realized that although many diseases are caused at least in part by a genetic component, few diseases originate from a single defective gene; most genetic diseases are caused by multiple genetic factors on multiple genes. Because the strategy of looking only at single genes was ineffective for finding the genetic components of many diseases, and because new technology made the cost of examining a single gene versus doing a genome-wide scan about the same, scientists began collecting much larger amounts of genetic information when any was to be collected at all. At the same time technological advances also made it possible for wide sharing of information, so when data was collected, many scientists doing genetics work found that access to data from genome-wide scans collected for any one reason would actually be useful in many other types of genetic research. Whereas before data usually stayed in one laboratory, now scientists began to store large amounts of genetic data in single places for community use and sharing.

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