Biobank confusion cleared up by new guidelines

The use of Biobanks looks set to change the way biological research is carried out in the future, but the vast array of guidelines set up to control their use could hamper science according to bioethics researchers.

A set of practical ethical guidelines for the use of biobanks could make research a lot easier

Swedish ethics researchers at the Center for Bioethics (CBE), together with leading biobank researchers, have put forward a pioneering solution - a set of practical ethical guidelines for biobank research.
Biobanks consist of systematically gathered biological samples and are valuable for both research and medical treatments. When the tissues samples are linked to good clinical data, they become indispensable to medical science.

However, a number of ethical issues are raised regarding the use of these samples. For instance, can the research community be certain that information about an individual will not reach the wrong people, such as employers and insurance companies?

Mats G. Hansson, professor of biomedical ethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the Karolinska Institute and Uppsala University said: “It is crucial to be able to weigh the conflicting interests, so that the regulation of biobank research doesn’t become a patient security problem in diagnosis, care, and treatment.”

Currently there is a plethora of extremely comprehensive guidelines and regulations in different countries, which causes major complications for biobank scientists, especially in international collaborative projects.

The new guidelines – presented in Nature Biotechnology - represent an ethical framework for research using previously collected tissue samples and guidelines that can be used as a practical and direct instrument for researchers.

When developing the guidelines, the group were keen that the process of peer-review was seen as just as important for guidelines as it is for research.

“It’s important that proposals regarding the ethical balancing of various interests be put through the same type of independent scrutiny by being peer-reviewed in established scientific journals, just like medical research,” said Hansson.