MANUFACTURING
Next Generation Biorepositories for Transformative Medicine A biorepository is a biobank that collects, processes, stores, and distributes biological materials to support future scientific investigation. Next generation biobanks with in-built capacities to store clinical grade biosamples, derived therapy grade cells, donor or patient’s clinical data, acquired cellular sequence data are forecast to lead in offering biobank derived transformative medicine. The biobanking industry’s future looks bright with deep entry barriers owing to the intellectual property surrounding the applications – A new order of the ages. S Dravida, Founder CEO, Transcell Biologics V Vellanki, Intern, Transcell Biolife Aman Iqbal, Scientist, Healthcare Entrepreneur
F
or centuries naturalist collected and curated various flora and fauna from around the world with the idea that these collections would provide important information about natural world. Biobanking was started with a similar purpose like collection of biospecimen as an inventory to be utilised for scientific research. The modern era of biobanking can be traced to have originated during the Cold War by anthropologists who had begun to collect and store blood and tissue samples from indigenous communities. They collected the samples fixated on the fact that these samples contained vital clues about genetic ancestry and human evolution. Biobanking in it’s various forms is an activity involving the collection of biospecimen and associated data and their storage for differing lengths of time before use. In some cases, biospecimens are immediately used, but in others, they're stored typically for the term of a specified project or in perpetuity until the materials are declared to be of little value with applications. The field of biobanking has further changed over the past thirty years. It went from predominantly university-based repositories that were developed for research needs of specific projects into institutional and government supported repositories, commercial biorepositories, population-based, disease-oriented biobanks and lastly, virtual biobanks. The information related to stored biospecimen have increased in complexity from basics data sets like date of collection, disease diagnosis, to extensive information sets like phenotype, clinical history, genomics, proteomics of the biosample.
54
P H A RM A F O C U S A S I A
ISSUE 39 - 2020
