Population-based biobanks

The mission of WP2 of BBMRI is to provide a strategy to solve the legal, governance and financial challenges involved in the Europe-wide cataloguing and storage of the vast amount of information collected in large epidemiological sample collections and population cohorts. The effort aims at establishing a European infrastructure for collection, storage, annotation, validation, and dissemination of the diverse data collected in national cohorts and sample collections. Such an infrastructure needs to be able to facilitate also the collection and storage of the biological data collected with ‘- omics' technologies from various platforms and diverse cell and tissue samples.

Contacts

Progress

WP2 has been working on a review of technical solutions and quality criteria for storage, retrieval and transfer of DNA samples in five different networking biobanks based on BBMRIs questionnaire for BBMRI prototype biobanks and the previous cataloguing efforts made by the P3G observatory. BBMRI prototype biobanks have been asked for detailed information on sample storage format, traceability, sample storage facilities and retrieval and LIMS.
 

1. Pilot Network DNA Chart (pdf-format)

2. Review of technical solutions and quality criteria (pdf-format)

Best practices and guidelines for biological repositories

Biobanks are structured collections of biological samples stored for the purposes of present and future research. There are guidelines and recommendations defining the general principles and best practices for organising biobanks but harmonisation of practices on more detailed questions is only emerging. Below we present short summaries of the most important guidelines.

OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and DevelopmentBest Practice Guidelines for Biological Resource Centers (2007)
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/7/13/38777417.pdf
-Provides a collection of guidelines for biological resource centers based on the experience of expert groups of the OECD members and the influence of scientific community.
-Comprises of best practice guidelines for all Biological Resource Centers and guidelines for micro-organism domain and human derived materials. Guidelines include organizational requirements, staff, premises, equipment, documentation, informatics, services, preparation and preservation of samples, quality audits and reviews.

ISBER (International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories) Best Practices for Repositories: Collection, Storage, Retrieval and Distribution of Human Biological Materials for Research (2008)
http://www.isber.org/Pubs/BestPractices2008.pdf
-Focuses on the best practices of human specimen and environmental collections reflecting in some aspects national, regional and local regulations. Guidelines are based on the experience of ISBER members.
-Comprises of organizational issues, management of records, facilities, storage equipment and environments, quality assurance and quality control, safety, training, material tracking, packaging and shipping, specimen collection, processing and retrieval relating matters.

NCI (National Cancer Institute)Best Practices for Biospecimen Resources (2007)
http://biospecimens.cancer.gov/global/pdfs/NCI_Best_Practices_060507.pdf
-Outlines the best practices for NCI-supported Biospecimen Resources formed by the NCI, National Institute of Health and US Department of Health and Human Services.
-Comprises of technical, operational, ethical, legal and policy best practices optimizing biospecimens for cancer research.

P3G (Population Project in Genomics) Observatory
http://www.p3gobservatory.org/
-Internet repository of information, scientific tools and catalogues aimed to promote the development and harmonization of research projects worldwide. Building of this repository is based on wide expertise of P3G members from different fields of biobanking.
-Comprises of various catalogues of information concerning population-based biobanks, harmonization tools, technical and scientific information on different areas of biorepositories; including a Comparison Chart of Guidelines for sample collection and processing.
http://www.p3gobservatory.org/repository/guidelines.htm