Biobanks in the era of personalized medicine: objectives, challenges, and innovation: Overview

Abstract

Biobanks are an important compound of personalized medicine and strongly support the scientific progress in stratification of population and biomarker discovery and validation due to progress in personalized medicine. Biobanks are an essential tool for new drug discoveries and drug development. Biobanks play an important role in the whole process of patient prevention and prediction, follow-up, and therapy monitoring and optimalization. Biobanks have the specificity in that they cover multidisciplinary approach to the human health combining biological and medical approaches, as well as informative bioinformatics technologies, computationing, and modeling. The importance of biobanks has during the last decade increased in variety and capacity from small collections of samples to large-scale national or international repositories. Collected samples are population-based, disease-specific or rare diseases originating from a diverse profile of individuals. There are various purposes of biobanks, such as diagnostics, pharmacology, or research. Biobanks involve, store, and operate with specific personal information, and as a consequence, such a diversity of biobanking is associated with a broad spectrum of ethical and legal issues. Biobanks are an international phenomenon because any single country, state, or society at the moment is not able to cover all issues involving the whole biobank problematic. Biobanks have an enormous innovative potential in the whole process of biomedical research in the twenty-first century.

Keywords: Biobanks; Definitions; Ethical and legal issues; History; Predictive preventive personalized medicine; Role of biobanks; Types.

Fig. 1

Main impacts of personalized medicine. The implementation of personalized medicine requires a confluence of multiple factors. Full implementation of personalized medicine can only be achieved when all sectors converge toward the center. Modified from [1]

Fig. 2

Ten ideas changing the Word right now. In 2009, Time Journal has published ten ideas that had influenced the world’s changes. On the eighth position were biobanks as potential for biomedical research. Modified from [2]

Fig. 3

Personalized medicine contribution to better health care. Stratification of patients is another result and requirement for the biobanks that enable shift from “one-size-fits-all” 11 to more targeted therapy, therapy models, and in silico therapies. A stratified approach enables to improve the individual health care, with respect to age, sex, demography, and relevant costs. Modified from [12]

Fig. 4

The projects including biobanking activities supported by Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (2009–2014). Modified from [32]

Fig. 5

The process of biobanking. Physicians and health care staff members fulfill essential roles in biobanking, which frequently intersects with routine clinical activity. By obtaining specific biobanking knowledge and expertise, individuals will be uniquely positioned to play leadership roles in this cross-cutting field within their institution. Modified from [52]