Money in the biobank: Standard protocols required to make best use of stored biosamples

Biobank potential

One of the most important aspects of modern clinical science is the ongoing quest to uncover the molecular basis behind diseases, which will lead to the development of diagnoses and treatments where there are currently none. At the forefront of this mission is the establishment of biobanks of biological tissue and fluids from which to draw samples for comparative analysis.

Even in 2010, it was estimated that there were more than one billion samples held in biobanks around the world, so it would appear that the future looks rosy for those wishing to access large numbers of tissues associated with a particular disease. Unfortunately, it is not that straightforward. The absence of accepted standards for the quality, collection and storage of biosamples, as well as appropriate global standards for their annotation, is making it difficult to ensure that selected samples are equivalent. The lack of certainty means that the results cannot be confidently related to each other.

In the proteomics world, material from biobanks is often used in comparative studies to try and identify biomarkers of disease but the ambiguity of sample history can introduce doubts about any conclusions. An international team of scientists is so concerned about these factors that it has addressed them in a detailed new report which they hope will raise awareness and initiate action.

Gyorgy Marko-Varga from Lund University, and colleagues, attack the problem from both sides, being biobank administrators and end users. They represent academic research, government regulating agencies, the drug development industry and commercial health care, so provide a broad user spectrum.

Standard operating procedures and protocols missing

Biobanks can range from small repositories in one lab or massive assemblies of samples in commercial collections of publicly funded projects, like blood banks. So, the potential for variations in collection and storage protocols is huge and Marko-Varga and his coauthors have described several key areas in which standardisation need to be introduced.

At the beginning of the process, standard operating procedures should be established to define the steps needed to preserve sample integrity. These should include means to ensure that samples are equivalent in terms of their form (eg fresh, frozen, slide sections), physical integrity and availability for use.

Having defined the criteria for samples, such as the type of tissue, they need to be checked so that they are fit for purpose. For instance, they might have degraded during storage. Procedures need to be in place for calibrating a sample against internal standards to allow the selection of the best samples from a biobank for a particular project. The authors highlight the need for new technology that will stabilise samples to maintain them in the condition that they were at collection.

In a similar vein, the introduction of automated sample processing will be needed to handle the increasing capacity of biobanks, and stable storage conditions are essential. Even at so-called ultralow temperatures, degradation can occur and backup power should always be available in case of power outages.

The need for clearer annotation of clinical samples, preferably using a controlled vocabulary, is also emphasised, as is the need for better clinical phenotyping. Factors like imaging data, pathology results and the clinical end point would give improved insights into the data acquired from the samples.

Although mass spectrometry is one of the key technologies in clinical proteomics, other techniques can also reveal information about protein expression and several examples were discussed by the researchers in the context of biobanks. They included digital imaging metadata, circulating tumour cell assays, and the use of ultrasonic standing waves on the microfluidic scale to separate circulating tumour cells.

The importance of biobanks in the Human Proteome Project, which aims to map the coding regions in the human chromosomes which express particular proteins, was also noted.

The main aim of the recent investment in biobanks is to improve the diagnosis and treatment of disease and appropriate sample workflows need to be in place to optimise the future use of stored samples. "The planning of how to achieve this goal is the collective responsibility of all of us who use this resource. Improving the ways we collect and utilize samples will also depend upon integrated systems that allow for search routines on sample collections, and types, as well as data sets that have been generated from these cohorts," say the authors.