How clinical biobanks can support precision medicine: from standardized preprocessing to treatment guidance

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Precision medicine aims for improving the efficiency of individual therapies. This requires that the attending physicians have access to reliable data also within the research context. Clinical biobanks are capable of obtaining and processing high-quality samples and data under standardized conditions, ensuring ethics and data protection, and providing the physician with research results.

Areas covered: This article describes the functions and responsibilities of biobanks within clinical everyday life and shows how biobanks as bridging infrastructures facilitate individualized therapies. The literature search was carried out using PubMed with the keywords listed below.

Expert opinion: The increasing work density and task complexity of the clinical staff are among the greatest challenges to advance precision medicine. Health-care decisions will increasingly be made in expert translational units like the molecular tumor board. Clinical biobanks, as an interdisciplinary interface between treating physicians, bioinformaticians, pathologists and medical scientists, bundle critical tasks in the precision medicine workflow and facilitate stratified information exchange. However, this can only be achieved by the increased visibility of biobanks in hospitals and public, as well as through financial sustainability. Particularly biobanks with a certified/accredited structure, guaranteeing standardized workflows, will be able to close the gap between translational research and clinical practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Biobank
• pre-analytics
• precision medicine

Article highlights

• Professional biobanks obtain, process, and provide high-quality biosamples and corresponding clinical phenotype data in a standardized and timely fashion, and account for data protection and ethical issues.

• Biobanks advance quality assurance and procedure harmonization: Through operation according to consensus best practices developed by the biobanking community, and accreditation by authorities, sample and data quality is increasingly assured and harmonized. Thus, research results are becoming reproducible and contribute to individual therapy guidance.

• Biobanks advance information management and data sharing: For successful translation of research findings into clinical applications, the data and information need to be accessible to multiple research and medical disciplines that collaborate together to advance precision medicine. This is enabled by advanced biobank IT-infrastructures and biobanking networks.

• Clinical biobanks represent interdisciplinary interfaces between routine and translational medicine, bundle critical tasks in the precision medicine workflow, and facilitate stratified information exchange.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewers Disclosure

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial relationships or otherwise to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.