Elsevier

Drug Discovery Today

Volume 23, Issue 11, November 2018, Pages 1809-1811
Drug Discovery Today

Editorial
Biobanks: let’s share specimens

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2018.08.008Get rights and content

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Specimen demand outstrips supply

Unfortunately, biospecimen procurement has long proved more difficult, requiring researchers to cobble together specimen collections from different labs, hospitals and biobanks from around the country or beyond. This approach has been laborious, time-consuming and costly – and has typically failed to produce the quantity, quality and specific types of specimens that researchers need from the patients they want.

Because of the difficulties that plague a researcher’s ability to procure

The sharing imperative

One serious biospecimen supply problem is the difficulty of freely sharing samples. In 2005, Sydney Medical School Associate Professor Daniel Catchpoole was more pointed, describing a phenomenon he termed biohoarding: “Rather than biobanking, we have been engaging in ‘biohoarding’, where building a quantifiable collection of tissue samples is the primary basis of the bio-resource. The root cause of ‘biohoarding’ is an ideological and motivational confusion as to the purpose for collecting the

What about the patient?

Another interesting fact: only 4% of our survey respondents said the number one goal of a biobank is ‘to support the wishes of the philanthropic patient’. Sixty-five percent selected goals reflecting the prestige of the organization. Granted, these goals aren’t mutually exclusive; but it is worth stopping to gently remind ourselves that there is an implicit duty to the patient from whom a sample is collected. When consenting to submitting a sample of their tumor, for example, patients are told

Policy issues

The path to wider specimen sharing is hardly an obvious one. Catchpoole argues, “The obligation to prevent ‘biohoarding’ lies not with researchers, funders or managers but with policy makers.” [1]. To his point, I see several policy problems. One unhelpful biobanking policy is the occasional mandate to keep biospecimens ‘in house’ (i.e., within the university or health system operating the biobank). This policy treats specimens as the institution’s intellectual property (IP) instead of the

Opportunity costs and technology

So can we fix this problem? Can we collectively do more to make biospecimens that were collected for research available, for a fair value, to the researchers who actually want to use them? Yes, I said ‘value’. Another policy problem is that many biobanks aren’t recovering the costs of their operations. This is unfortunate given the concern by a vast majority of biobanks about their financial sustainability [3]. Biobanks need to understand that charging for the service of providing biospecimens

Solutions

It’s time for the biomedical industry to do for research what e-commerce has done for consumers: bring specimens online and eliminate unnecessary friction for researchers trying to procure them. Specifically, the research community needs a central, searchable, eBay-like marketplace offering:

  • i.

    specimens already available for research (such as specimens banked in biorepositories);

  • ii.

    specimens from patients willing and able to prospectively provide them.

My company has accepted this challenge. Just as

Going forward

With data driving precision medicine and biospecimens conveying the data, we believe the broader sharing of biospecimens will deliver enormous benefits to medicine. Not only is it the right thing to do it is entirely in our interests from mission, patient satisfaction and financial sustainability perspectives. Technology can assist as it does in every other realm of life and work. For medical breakthroughs to accelerate, and patients to experience the ‘miraculous’ outcomes that are just around

References (3)

  • D. Catchpoole

    ‘Biohoarding’: treasures not seen, stories not told

    J. Health Services Res. Policy

    (2016)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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