Abstract

Hospital-integrated Biobank as an Infrastructure Boosting Diagnostics Discovery and Development

Olli Carpen, Professor of Pathology, Scientific Director , University of Helsinki & Helsinki Biobank

Hospital-integrated biobanks, if linked with longitudinal and comprehensive electronic medical information, provide a critical infrastructure for the path towards personalized medicine. Effective unleashing of the existing, but underutilized sample and datasets, can significantly boost diagnostics discovery and validation and help to create companion diagnostics platforms. Finland, with its public high coverage and high quality health care, long history of electronic medical records, archives of millions of annotated diagnostic legacy samples and modern legislation is spearheading the efforts to unleash existing valuable information from public sources for diagnostics R&D. As a network of six Finnish biobanks covers the entire population, large scale prospective projects can be easily initiated. The biobanks are fully integrated within hospital infrastructures enabling implementation of cost-effective clinical grade sample collection as part of everyday health care. The recently launched "consent all comers" approach aims to consent and collect a biobank sample from every patient visiting the hospitals, thereby providing everyone the possibility to become a research patient. An important asset for the biobanks is direct linkage to electronic medical records pool, a dataset including structured information from all major electronic records used at the hospitals. In my presentation, I will describe the modern Finnish biobanking concept and demonstrate how it has been successfully utilized to generate novel diagnostics inventions, including new ways to stratify ovarian cancer patients according to treatment response and to monitor disease relapse.