Name: Bank of Clinical Specimens
Institution: Masaryk Memorial Cancer Institute
Coordinator: doc. Mgr. Roman Hrstka, Ph.D., hrstka@mou.cz
Website
BBMRI-CZ collects and stores human biological material and associated clinical data. Primary tumour tissues and other samples that would otherwise be irretrievably lost for future research are specifically collected as they are not routinely preserved in health care institutions. The human biological material is catalogued into collections in BBMRI-CZ and these comprehensively characterized collections are a key element for both current and future research projects. The unique units of these collections are no longer denoted as samples, but rather as “data/sample sets” that aggregate clinical data with a specified biological material. BBMRI-CZ is inherently anchored in the backbone institutions of Czech academic medicine, faculty hospitals and specialized health care institutions. BBMRI-CZ has also a unique set of technologies and especially knowledge for conducting translational research and for transferring clinical applications from translational research to academic clinical trials. The user community utilizes the expertise of the skilled staff of BBMRI-CZ, ranging from their consulting and data services to the human biological material stored in BBMRI-CZ biorepositories. BBMRI-CZ is represented as Czech national node in the BBMRI-ERIC European Research Infrastructure Consortium (Biobanks and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure Consortium) and the Czech Republic is its founding Member State. BBMRI-CZ, as a part of BBMRI-ERIC, is currently a central medical research infrastructure that is focusing on the problem of the irreproducibility
of research results through the implementation of quality control processes into activities related to the long-term archiving of human biological material and its subsequent use for meaningful research purposes. Representatives of BBMRI-CZ are actively working in the European consortium BBMRI-ERIC. New services for communication between biobanks and research teams include the IT tools called BBMRI-ERIC Directory and BBMRI-ERIC Negotiator. BBMRI-CZ fundamentally participates in the development of these IT tools for the European research community. The BBMRI-ERIC Directory is a horizontal cataloguing tool that provides concise, sufficiently clear information about the European biobanks involved in BBMRI-ERIC. This tool supports finding a suitable partner biobank for researchers interested in specific clinical samples. The BBMRI-ERIC Negotiator tool then enables specific communication between the applicant (research, development) and the provider (the institution managing the biobank).
