A national collection of liver tumours: lessons learnt from 6 years of biobanking in France.

Eight liver centres in France have joined their effort to collect, preserve and distribute tissue samples from hepatocellular carcinomas, according to the recommendations for Biological Resources Centres (BRC) released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which were recently implemented in France. This led to the creation of a Liver cancer biobanks network which is recognized by the Ministry of research and the Ministry of health and sponsored by the main research agencies, namely Inserm and INCa. Samples are collected and stored locally, whereas related annotations are remotely collected within a central database. The management of the network includes a Scientific Committee, an Executive Board and an Epidemiology and Management Coordinating Centre. Samples are made available to research groups following acceptance of research projects submitted to the scientific committee. Samples from the Liver cancer biobanks network were used in recent works aiming at identifying key genomic alterations occurring in the development of hepatocellular carcinomas, as well as new set of biomarkers, including transcriptomic and proteomic signatures, and candidate targets for anti-cancer drugs.