Excellent biobank structures play a decisive role in this age of precision medicine. To successfully research the causes and mechanisms of diseases, scientists require high-quality biological materials such as blood, urine and tissue samples as well as comprehensive clinical information. The new BIH Charité Biobank at the Virchow-Klinikum campus is a clinical biobank, which means that it primarily collects, stores and processes biological samples from patients and links these samples to clinical information. It thus serves as the connecting link between clinical treatment and research and creates additional potential for translational research in Berlin. "The new biobank provides us with an outstanding basis for the dawning era of personalized medicine and data-driven medical research," says Prof. Erwin Böttinger, Chief Executive Officer of BIH. Data protection and data security and the safeguarding of privacy rights are key conditions for all work in this field.
Wide range of storage options
A special feature of the new biobank is the wide range of options for storing the samples. The two-story building has been designed to hold more than two million samples under standardized conditions of the highest quality. The biological samples are stored on an area of 500 square meters at temperatures between +4°C and -196°C. The connection of the biobank to medical care provides access to tissue samples, various types of liquid samples (including serum, plasma, urine, cerebrospinal fluid) and processed biological materials such as DNA and RNA. The biobank also has a fully-automated deep-freeze storage area (-80°C), where the storage and retrieval of biological samples is controlled by 2D barcode technology. The biobank specializes particularly in the automated isolation of nucleic acid and is equipped with an automated DNA extractor that can extract DNA from 32 large-volume blood or saliva samples per run. Several sample scanners are available to digitize histological sections of which high-definition images can then be produced and made available to researchers online.Foundation for personalized medicine
"The new biobank is an incredibly important step for the Charité, BIH and for Berlin as a whole, because biobanks serve as very important collections of biological samples that can be used to study the genesis and development of diseases, to make more accurate predictions and to develop new personalized treatment methods," says Professor Axel Radlach Pries, Dean of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Extensive and well-characterized data sets are needed particularly to develop personalized precision medicine which involves using biomarkers to identify subgroups that are relevant to therapy. Charité’s centralized biological sample bank ZeBanC has been systematically collecting biological samples from patients in medical care and from clinical studies since 2011. These sample collections will now be incorporated and expanded in the new BIH Charité Biobank. Over the next years, BIH, Charité and Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) will jointly focus on developing new patient cohorts for research.Data protection through double pseudonymization
The new biobank will store samples from patients at the Charité and from the clinical studies conducted by BIH research projects. The samples and the patient data have the best possible protection. “The new biobank applies a certified data protection concept that uses double pseudonymization, in other words a double coding of samples and data, which makes it impossible to re-identify patients and test subjects,” explains Prof. Michael Hummel, head of the BIH Charité Biobank. The use of samples and data for research projects is only possible with the prior consent of the Ethics Committee of the Charité.New building is made of wood
The BIH Charité Biobank is Germany’s first laboratory building made of wood. The decision for this construction method was based on criteria pertaining to weight, construction time, costs and sustainability criteria.The biobank of Berlin Institute of Health and the Charité will be established at two sites in Berlin: At the Charité’s Virchow-Klinikum campus, where a wide range of biological samples from medical care and clinical research will be collected and stored, and at the Charité’s Berlin-Buch campus, the home of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC). The Berlin-Buch facility will focus on the long-term storage of liquid samples from large patient cohorts.