Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
UK Biobank's 500,000-participant prospective cohort.
- Is an instance
FinnGen's combination of genomic data with Finnish national health registries.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A pathology archive used solely for clinical care, not research, is not a biobank in the research sense.
- Not an instance
A bioinformatics database of public sequences is not a biobank — there are no physical samples.
Editorial commentary
A biobank is an organised collection of human biological samples — blood, tissue, DNA, urine, and similar — together with the clinical, demographic, and lifestyle data linked to each sample, maintained specifically for biomedical research use. Biobanks range in scale from small, disease-specific collections at a single hospital to large national population cohorts such as UK Biobank (roughly 500,000 participants) and FinnGen, and international consortia such as All of Us.
The governance layer that actually defines “biobank”
What separates a biobank from a general sample repository is not the physical storage — freezers and LN2 tanks look the same either way — but the human-subjects governance overlaid on top: ethics/IRB approval, informed consent (which may be specific to one study, broad for a defined future-research programme, or occasionally an even wider “blanket” model), an access committee that reviews and approves each proposed research use of the samples, and defined recontact and withdrawal procedures. A participant withdrawing consent typically stops future use and distribution of their samples even though the physical material and data collected under earlier, valid consent may remain banked, subject to the biobank’s own withdrawal policy — a nuance with no equivalent in a repository holding non-human specimens.
Federation and standards
Individual biobanks increasingly federate rather than operate in isolation: BBMRI-ERIC (Biobanking and BioMolecular resources Research Infrastructure), established as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium in 2013, provides a pan-European catalogue and common access framework across member biobanks, and ISBER (International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories) publishes widely-adopted best-practice standards for sample handling and biobank operations. Modern biobanks are also increasingly genomic — pairing physical samples with sequencing or other -omics data generated from them, which raises its own additional consent and data-governance questions distinct from the physical-sample layer alone.
References
- Hewitt R., Watson P., ‘Defining biobank’, Biopreservation and Biobanking 11(5), 2013.
Also known as
Population biobank · Disease biobank
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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