Cancer diagnosis increasingly relies on molecular tests performed on stored blood and tissue samples, and the reliability of those tests depends on how carefully the samples were collected, processed, and stored. Biobanks are the facilities that safeguard these samples, and international guidelines define how they should operate. Many of these guidelines have changed in the last three years, making older summaries out of date. This review brings together, in one place, the 2026 status of the international standards, ethical and legal rules, quality requirements, and data standards that govern biobanking, and explains where each one acts along the journey from donor to diagnosis. It also offers a practical, step-by-step roadmap and checklist to help hospitals and research teams establish new biobanks that are trustworthy, sustainable, and ready to support precision cancer medicine. Finally, it sets out in practical terms how to keep the time between removing a sample and preserving it as short as possible, and how the quality of living laboratory models grown from patients’ tumors should be checked before those models are used.
This article was published in MDPI Cancers.
To read full article follow- https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers18182974