The South Brisbane hospital runs the state’s only program using live collections of gynaecological tissue samples to improve treatments of aggressive cancers.

The live tissue samples provide a better result compared with cryopreserved cells, where the samples can be damaged during freezing and thawing methods, causing cells to die.

Instead, researchers can use and manipulate a patient’s living cancer cells in a petri dish, or even grow them in a pre-clinical model to better understand how ovarian cancer develops, and find the cancer’s weak points that might be susceptible to novel therapies.

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Access to cryobanked cells and other banked biomaterials has been crucial to studies of ecology, evolution, genomics, and the health of wildlife, fostering an unprecedented understanding of life on earth. These materials also serve as the foundation for a pivotal new set of conservation options — including cloning, as well as the many more technological advances that can be anticipated — that afford us the opportunity to safeguard genetic capital, support population sustainability, and reduce extinction risk. 

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He approved the scheme at a meeting of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council.

The plans were presented to Sheikh Khaled by members of the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi.

The project will create a biobank to support the provision of personalized medicine through advanced treatment programs that use human stem cells and tissues to develop medical research, the Abu Dhabi Media Office said.

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These diseases, spanning dystrophies and myopathies, are characterized by severe muscle weakness, usually from infancy, that can impact swallowing, and breathing and lead to eye problems and learning difficulties. About 30 people a year are diagnosed with a congenital muscular disease in Australia, of which half will have a genetic basis identified.

Murdoch Children’s Dr. Peter Houweling said there was an unmet need for affordable treatments that could be fast-tracked into clinical trials.

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Four different cryopreservation methods for P. vivax were compared, and one method provided improved parasite recovery and maturation in short-term in vitro cultures. Using this method, a biobank of clinical isolates was established with multiple freezes per isolate and validated by showing the ability to enrich parasites post-thaw with KCl-Percoll gradients, and for at least 60% of parasites to successfully mature in short-term in vitro cultures. 

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VA SHIELD is designed to create a comprehensive repository of disease specimens and associated data available to advance scientific understanding of diseases and develop diagnostic, therapeutic, and preventative strategies for immediate use in clinical environments. VA SHIELD’s infrastructure now consists of a Coordinating Center, twelve collection sites, two biobanks, and a bioinformatics core.

As of August 2023, the biorepository has collected more than 40,000 specimens from VA hospitals. VA principal investigators are invited to request sharing those specimens for research purposes.

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The biobank stores brain cancer biospecimens and genomic data from patients treated at Canberra Hospital. It contributes to Brain Cancer Biobanking Australia, a virtual biobank hub that allows researchers around the country to access brain cancer tissue, samples, and data.

The information gathered by the biobank enables researchers at ANU’s John Curtin School of Medical Research to create 3D bio-printed ‘mini brains’, allowing them to analyse how tumours grow and respond to treatment, and to trial new therapeutic drugs tailored to each patient.

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But automated analysis is of little use if the degree of automation in storing and handling the samples cannot keep up. Funded by the Dieter Morszeck Foundation, the DKFZ, therefore, set up the so-called “biorepository” – a logistics center for the long-term storage of valuable biomaterials.

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The tissue bank of the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg, together with the tissue bank of the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), has achieved accreditation for the first time in Germany according to a new standard created specifically for biobanks. The accreditation proves the high performance of the biobanks, which meet the requirements of excellent research. The process was accompanied by the German Accreditation Body (DAkkS) and the German Biobank Node (GBN).

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Led by Professor Panagiotis Vlamos, who heads the Informatics Department and is director of the Bioinformatics and Human Electrophysiology Laboratory, the team has successfully created 10 state-of-the-art AI biobanks.

In total, these biobanks have accumulated a substantial amount of data, including over 5 million data points related to gene expressions, more than 50,000 imaging data sets, and findings from over 300 independent studies. 

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