GBA/GBN-position on the feedback of incidental findings in biobank-based research: consensus-based workflow for hospital-based biobanks.

Incidental research findings pose a considerable challenge to hospital-based research biobanks since they are acting as intermediaries between healthcare and research. In a joint action the centralized biobank ibdw (Interdisciplinary Bank of Biomaterials and Data Wuerzburg) together with local authorities drafted a coherent concept to manage incidental research findings in full compliance with relevant ethical and data privacy regulations. The concept was developed and elaborated in close collaboration with the German Biobank Alliance (GBA).

Management of Metadata Types in Basic Cardiological Research.

Introduction: Ensuring scientific reproducibility and compliance with documentation guidelines of funding bodies and journals is a topic of greatly increasing importance in biomedical research. Failure to comply, or unawareness of documentation standards can have adverse effects on the translation of research into patient treatments, as well as economic implications. In the context of the German Research Foundation-funded collaborative research center (CRC) 1002, an IT-infrastructure sub-project was designed.

Stakeholder engagement to ensure the sustainability of biobanks: a survey of potential users of biobank services.

Biobanks are important infrastructures facilitating biomedical research. After a decade of rolling out such infrastructures, a shift in attention to the sustainability of biobanks could be observed in recent years. In this regard, an increase in the as yet relatively low utilisation rates of biobanks has been formulated as a goal.

Harmonization of Biobank Education for Biobank Technicians: Identification of Learning Objectives.

The quality of biospecimens stored in a biobank depends tremendously on the technical personnel responsible for processing, storage, and release of biospecimens. Adequate training of these biobank employees would allow harmonization of correct sample handling and thus ensure a high and comparable quality of samples across biobank locations. However, in Germany there are no specific training opportunities for technical biobank staff.

Position Statement from the German Biobank Alliance on the Cooperation Between Academic Biobanks and Industry Partners.

Under the umbrella of the German Biobank Node (GBN), 11 biobanks and two IT development centers are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to work together in the German Biobank Alliance (GBA). Their common aim is to make existing biomaterials hosted by different biobanks nationally and internationally available for biomedical research. This position article reflects and summarizes contributions and comments made during a GBA workshop, on the cooperation between academic biobanks and pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies that took place in Leipzig on the 21st of June 2018.

HDAC1 links early life stress to schizophrenia-like phenotypes.

Schizophrenia is a devastating disease that arises on the background of genetic predisposition and environmental risk factors, such as early life stress (ELS). In this study, we show that ELS-induced schizophrenia-like phenotypes in mice correlate with a widespread increase of histone-deacetylase 1 () expression that is linked to altered DNA methylation. overexpression in neurons of the medial prefrontal cortex, but not in the dorsal or ventral hippocampus, mimics schizophrenia-like phenotypes induced by ELS.

Architecture of a Biomedical Informatics Research Data Management Pipeline.

In University Medical Centers, heterogeneous data are generated that cannot always be clearly attributed to patient care or biomedical research. Each data set has to adhere to distinct intrinsic and operational quality standards. However, only if high-quality data, tools to work with the data, and most importantly guidelines and rules of how to work with the data are addressed adequately, an infrastructure can be sustainable.

"Life in Data"--Outcome of a Multi-Disciplinary, Interactive Biobanking Conference Session on Sample Data.

Introduction: Clinical, biodiversity, and environmental biobanks share many data standards, but there is a lack of harmonization on how data are defined and used among biobank fields. This article reports the outcome of an interactive, multidisciplinary session at a meeting of the European, Middle Eastern, and African Society for Biopreservation and Biobanking (ESBB) designed to encourage a 'learning-from-each-other' approach to achieve consensus on data needs and data management across biobank communities.

Materials, Methods, And Results: The Enviro-Bio and ESBBperanto Working Groups of the ESBB co-organized an interactive session at the 2013 conference (Verona, Italy), presenting data associated with biobanking processes, using examples from across different fields.

Changing requirements and resulting needs for IT-infrastructure for longitudinal research in the neurosciences.

The observation of growing "difficulties" in IT-infrastructures in neuroscience research during the last years led to a search for reasons and an analysis on how this phenomenon is reflected in the scientific literature. With a retrospective analysis of nine examples of multicenter research projects in the neurosciences and a literature review the observation was systematically analyzed. Results show that the rise in complexity mainly stems from two reasons: (1) more and more need for information on quality and context of research data (metadata) and (2) long-term requirements to handle the consent and identity/pseudonyms of study participants and biomaterials in relation to legal requirements.

Improving IT-Support for Biobank Users.

To improve IT-support for biobank users by the Department of Medical Informatics (MI) a questionnaire was designed addressing topics regarding the provided software and the IT-support. Different stakeholders of supported projects were identified and the interviews were performed with five users. The developed questionnaire consisted of five sections and 50 questions.

How to design biospecimen identifiers and integrate relevant functionalities into your biospecimen management system.

Effective tracking of biospecimens within a biobank requires that each biospecimen has a unique identifier (ID). This ID can be found on the sample container as well as in the biospecimen management system. In the latter, the biospecimen ID is the key to annotation data such as location, quality, and sample processing.

A framework for biobank sustainability.

Each year funding agencies and academic institutions spend millions of dollars and euros on biobanking. All funding providers assume that after initial investments biobanks should be able to operate sustainably. However the topic of sustainability is challenging for the discipline of biobanking for several major reasons: the diversity in the biobanking landscape, the different purposes of biobanks, the fact that biobanks are dissimilar to other research infrastructures and the absence of universally understood or applicable value metrics for funders and other stakeholders.