Biobank Ireland is promoting the development of a Biobank Network throughout the island of Ireland as a bridge between cancer research and care.
Biobank Ireland is promoting the development of a Biobank Network throughout the island of Ireland as a bridge between cancer research and care.
This new infrastructure will facilitate large national and international translational research (see What is Translational Research?) collaborations that will raise Ireland’s research profile and benefit those with cancer Researchers will have online access to samples and to restricted patient data from participating hospitals and an equitable withdrawal process for scientifically and ethically approved projects Important research results will be explained to the public
Other Objectives:
- Biobank Ireland will promote the translation of important research findings into better, less toxic treatments and a better prognosis.
- Will enhance clinical trials, by incorporating molecular research on patients’ cancer tissue, to more precisely identify a patient’s best treatment,
- To fast-track the trend towards “personalised medicine” (i.e. focusing treatment on the patient rather than treating the disease),
- Biobank Ireland recognises the need to have harmonisation in biobanking around the world and will encourage Irish participation in dealing with global biobanking challenges.
- Biobank Ireland will seek to have the hospital-based Biobank Network funded by government as standard of care.
How These Objectives and Goals will be Realised:
- Hospital-based Steering Committee
- Research and Ethics Committee approval
- Compliance with Data Protection Act
- Consent for Prospective Biobanking (1 tumour type)
- Medical scientist, pathologist, biobank director; CEO agreement; sample inventory database; NCI biobanking guidelines and international best practice procedures
- Database for restricted data Online Display
- Test, re-evaluate, interrogate clinical database
- Second and third hospitals; additional tumour type(s)
- Enter restricted data from each hospital in online database
- Test biobank and clinical database interfaces
- Re-evaluate first phase of Network – sample more tumour types
- Define fair sample withdrawal procedure, Scientific Review
- Presentations, publications acknowledging the Network
- Obtain government support to add more hospitals to Network
- Register more researchers