German Congress of Laboratory Medicine: 19th Annual Congress of the DGKL and 6th Symposium of the Biomedical Analytics of the DVTA e. V. together with the 6th German POCT-Symposium

Collection of human biospecimens linked to relevant personal-and health information has become indispensable for developing innovations in biomedical research, making a great impact on disease screening and diagnostics.We present the concept of biobanking at the Heart and Diabetes Centre NRW which was developed across the different facilities of our university hospital.A working group including one staff member of each facility was funded in 2012 which developed standardized processes and documents considering the ethical-and legal requirements for biobanking.A patient consent form according to a template provided by the "Arbeitskreis Medizinischer Ethikkommissionen" e.V. (AKEK) and a handling instruction were prepared according to the needs of each facility willing to establish a biobank.This process was proved through the responsible local ethical committee.Several disease-oriented biobanks and a population-based biobank taking samples from healthy blood donors were built.These biobank samples are used to screen biomarkers for disease susceptibility and are linked to health data such as clinical, lifestyle and environmental data.Acquisition, handling and storage of the acquired samples is conducted by the clinical routine diagnostic laboratory.Future projects deal with improving the logistics and IT-infrastructures of sample documentation by introducing CENTRAXX as sample-and data management system.