The German Biobank Alliance (GBA) has two new partner biobanks: three years after its founding, a total of 20 biobank locations and two IT development centres are now working together within the German alliance of academic biobanks. BioBank Bonn and BioBank Mainz have now also joined. All GBA partners work to uniform quality standards and are linked via a common IT structure. This allows biosamples to be made available for medical research across all locations and accelerates the development of new treatments.
Biobanks collect, process and store human body substances, such as blood and tissue. They therefore provide an important basis for medical research. “Doctors and researchers use biosamples to identify the causes of diseases and develop new targeted treatments,” explains Dr. Astrid Schwaiger, the head of BioBank Bonn, which is one of the new partners in the biobank alliance.
The German Biobank Node (GBN) led the founding of GBA in 2017 with eleven biobank sites and two IT development centres. A further seven biobanks joined the alliance in 2019; BioBank Bonn and BioBank Mainz have now also followed suit. With their collections, the biobanks expand the alliance’s shared pool of biosamples. Scientists can use the “Sample Locator” online tool (https://samplelocator.bbmri.de) to search for certain characteristics to find suitable samples for their research. “Measures such as comprehensive quality testing and training programmes improve sample processing among all partners in the alliance and facilitate their standardisation,” says GBN’s managing director, Dr. Cornelia Specht. “We wish to make research results even more reliable in this way.”
In recent years, many biobanks have been transformed into highly professional, closely networked research infrastructures. “The German Biobank Alliance has been instrumental in this development,” says the head of GBA, Prof. Dr. Michael Hummel. “The relevance of highly qualified biobanks to medical research is particularly clear in the times of Covid-19. GBA is opening up to new partners so that a growing number of biobanks can benefit from the network, and researchers can access existing samples quickly and easily.”
More information:
