Advancing Biobanking in Europe to Foster Diagnostics and Therapies Discovery & Development

Background/Objectives: BBMRI-ERIC is the European research infrastructure for biobanking and biomolecular resources. BBMRI has been granted ERIC-status (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) by the European Commission in 2013. Currently, 24 countries and the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer constitute with its National Nodes and affiliated biobanks BBMRI-ERIC as one of the largest infrastructures in health and life sciences. BBMRI-ERIC’s mission is to facilitate access to sample, data, and biomolecular resources to enable high-quality research, particularly personalized medicine.

Methods/Results: This is facilitated through services and advancements in the areas of Ethical, Legal and Societal Issues (ELSI), Quality Management (QM), Information Technology (IT), Biobank Development (BBD), Public Affairs (PA), Outreach, Education & Communications (OEC), and Finance- and Project Management (FPM). Hereby, BBMRI-ERIC engages its community and partners in more than 24 active EU projects fostering different domains towards genomic medicine including e.g. rare diseases, cancer, neurological disorders, pediatrics, and infectious diseases. Our federated access and analysis platform has not only become a strong asset for major EU initiatives (e.g., EHDS, 1+Mio, GDI, EUCAIM) but helps scientists and clinicians to accelerate diagnostics and therapies discovery & development: BBMRI’s fully GDPR-compliant pipeline enables access to samples and data of over 5.1 Mio. patients facilitated by over 400 biobanks across 32 countries. The data comprise 7,834 distinct OMOP variables with biochemical measurements plus different types of OMICs data including e.g., over 200,000 genomes.

Conclusions: We will showcase how to access and make use of the richness of BBMRI-ERIC’s resources and how to collaborate with our wider community on different topics through in-house or EU funding – locally, nationally or EU wide to foster diagnostics discovery and development of new therapies.