Blog Posts 

The Main Reason Academic Biobanks Should Provide Biosamples to Industry The main reason is to improve patient care. Industry plays a vital role in bringing new therapies and diagnostics to the patient. Yet, industry can only achieve this if it can access suitable...

Public Attitudes to Biobank Cooperation With Industry In general, industry involvement in research tends to lower public trust. We see this effect whether the industry sector funds or conducts the investigation. Here are a few critical studies on the subject. A...

Most human biosamples originate in the public sector. That is in public hospitals and publicly-funded population biobanks. So we need public-private partnerships for biosamples to reach the private sector.   Public-Private Partnerships in Biobanking This section...

This article examines three different industry players that require biospecimen suppliers to meet their human tissue procurement needs. Large pharmaceutical companies Large in vitro diagnostics companies Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in healthcare biotechnology...

Academic biobanks have a dual role: they must support two actors in a production that advances in patient care. The two actors they need to support are (1) researchers in academia and (2) researchers in industry. It is only by the efforts of both these actors that...

According to one dictionary definition, commodification is: 'The action or process of treating something as a mere commodity'. A commodity is 'a substance or product that can be traded, bought, or sold'. 'Commodification' is often used disapprovingly, especially...

What kind of financial transactions are legitimate for human biological samples? There is some uncertainty about the correct answer to this question. There are also some differences of opinion.   The Oviedo Convention The Council of Europe’s Oviedo Convention...

It is not easy for industry researchers to find suitable academic biobanks. For one thing, the biobank needs to have the clinical samples required. For another, it must have policies that allow industry access. Unfortunately, biobank access policies may contain...

Every biosample or tissue sample used for medical research has a different journey. The journey starts when a person donates a biosample and it ends when a researcher analyses the same sample. In between, there are a wide variety of possible routes, events and...