Biobanking For A Healthier World

[Music]

[Music]

[Applause]

hello everyone

it’s really terrific to be here today

and i hope you enjoyed this tedx event

as

much as i do now i don’t know about your

experience

but when i get to new meet get to meet

new people like in this event here or at

the dinner party

the conversation sooner or later turns

into each other’s jobs

right and then i get asked so what’s

your job about what are you doing

and then i i pause and i really have to

think how to best explain

what am i doing i certainly

love my job i’m feeling absolutely

privileged

being able to do what i’m doing and it’s

the most interesting

fascinating diverse interdisciplinary

meaningful

but yet challenging work i have ever

been dreaming about

i am a biobanker and we heard

there is quite often some

misunderstanding no i’m not a banker

i’m a biobanker and even so there might

be common concepts

the focus of biobanking is absolutely

different one

and luckily we have tedx because now i

can explain

in more detail what it really means and

what biobanking means to each one of you

us and the world all over and that’s

what i’d like to

showcase in the next few minutes to you

now let’s start thinking of

what really a biobank is the concept of

it

and think about what is the most

precious item

you think of i’m not talking about your

wife your husband children

family relatives no maybe it’s a watch

you inherited from your granddad

or it is jewelry you obtained as a gift

from a special person

you certainly want to keep that

previous item safe protected and you

also do want to know where it is at all

times just to be sure

it’s there right and that’s the concepts

that biobanks also also bring about so

they

safeguard very appreciate samples and

associated data they protect them they

preserve them

in addition to that they monitor these

samples and data

for their life cycle well what does it

mean

life cycle well the biobank doesn’t come

with all the samples right now and i

will explain a little bit further

down the road what samples can be in

data

but you have to obtain the data and the

samples first and then you need to

process them

in order to preserve the most natural

state of these samples

and after processing them you want to

conserve them at that stage

and therefore depending on the purpose

later on down the life cycle of the

sample

you conserve them either at 4 degrees

at -20 at minus 80 or below even minus

150

30 degrees and for that we have nowadays

and you can see it behind

me basically highly automated

high throughput systems and they not

only allow to easily put the samples

into this facility but they also allow

if they are sample requests

to take from different locations in this

facility

samples out bring them together and hand

them over to those ones who requested

and that’s the next very specific topic

of biobanks

we don’t collect samples or data for our

own

purpose for ourselves now we want to

enable others to work with it

to foster research and innovation and i

think this is a very specific

characteristics of biobankers we

actually bioshare us here biosharing

samples and data and they will enable

others to work on those

now this might be very simplistic

overview of biobanking

and it comes more specific and detailed

if you look at the requirements that we

need

to tackle the first of all is by

specimen science which means we really

need to understand to research ourselves

how to obtain a sample and preserve it

the best

there’s also quality management so we

need to define how best

standardize our processes and how to

ensure

the quality of a sample now and forever

basically and to have it comparable

across different biobanks there is also

the it infrastructure

so we need basically to monitor the

samples and data

across their lifecycle now and reliable

and continuously but we also need to

connect the biobanks across the world in

order to make

full potential of all what we have in

our biobanks

we also need equipment of course we need

to basically have the entire workflow

covered and sometimes you actually not

only need to

validate new equipment we might even

need to build new equipment

because we still are need of certain

things which are not there yet

of course we also need to tackle healthy

issues

this is a short abbreviation for ethics

legal and social issues

and this is basically where we need to

work in adherence to ethics and legal

issues

and regulations and we talk with our

stakeholders

and customers how this can be further

developed so we take

taking the time and discuss with

patients patient representatives

with industry partners with the public

with politicians

medical doctors and so on to be really

developing

how we can use make use of these samples

further

now you can see from all these kind of

requirements

that the work of a biobanker is highly

interdisciplinary

right we need to work together and this

is really interesting but also sometimes

challenging because all of us having a

different profession

be biologists medical doctors

veterinarians

ethicists lawyers physicists i.t

specialists we all speak different

languages so that’s a challenge right

there

how to basically make biobanks working

function and being successful

but it comes even more tricky if you

consider what kind

of main domains or types of biobanks are

actually out there

and this is highlighted behind me there

are hospital integrated biobanks

there are population-based biobanks then

we have also human biomonitoring

planned biobanks environment biobanks

domestic and wildlife biobanks and

museum biobanks

and i selected just a few examples of

few of them

to show you how important biobanks are

for all of us and to make even the world

healthier

so let’s start with healthcare

integrated biobanking and it’s all about

the patient

coming to the hospital with a specific

disease

and biobanks don’t care that much about

routine diagnostics on samples and data

and samples can be tissue or liquid

samples

so this is not what we care of but we

care about the research

in order that research can improve

precision medicine

and that’s why they are in need of

samples and data

and behind me it shows you basically to

you that for a long time there was a

real structural gap between

clinical care and the research side the

sample

somehow got into the research side

but we didn’t know anything about the

quality how they were obtained

and data were missing most of the time

so we know

today that many research projects in the

past

didn’t come up with meaningful

conclusion because

the samples were lacking quality and the

results cannot be applied in the

clinical site

so what what happened then is basically

we have closed this gap with centralized

quality certified biobanks and it’s a

learning circle where basically the

structural biobanks can

from patient um consenting

sample collection processing storage and

biomaterial requests basically give

high quality samples and data from the

clinical side

to the research side but this data also

go back to the clinicians to feed into

therapy guidance and this has been

obviously

very important now in the covet pandemic

where biobanks were helping on the

clinical side

actually making it a little bit easier

for the clinicians to collect

these valuable samples from covert

patients in order to foster

coming up with new diagnostic tests or

developing basically

vaccines but also of course we also

support

clinical trials or nuclear tumor boards

and i would like to

characterize a little bit what molecular

tumors are about

so if you have a cancer patient who has

failed

all guideline therapies this patient has

no hope really

whatsoever so it’s a life expectancy of

a few weeks

months maybe and there there are no

guideline therapies

so what the only thing you can do is

basically get

fresh samples prepare them in a high

quality way and for the purpose

for the newest technologies in research

and then this data

come back get into systems medicine and

then we

hopefully can give the molecular tumor

board and the patient the therapy

guidance

now we do this with biobanks because we

know best about the sample quality and

the purpose these samples are needed for

and there’s one case i want to show you

basically it was a female

patient with pancreatic cancer one of

the most devastating tumor diseases this

pencil

this cancer was basically quite advanced

this patient

was not operable on enter the life

expectancy of about three months

so we supported with the biobank

infrastructure getting the samples right

at the ore biopsy of this

tumor prepared the way that the

downstream analysis could use it to the

maximum

analyzing different regulation levels

and then giving the data back to systems

medicine and you can easily see

even you even so you’re not an expert

that in the center there’s one node and

that reflects one gene mutation which is

surrounded by

many many smaller dots which are other

genes which reflect

other signaling pathways so this one

gene mutation is the achilles heel of

that tumor for that particular patient

so we suggested

that this patient should get a low dose

routine chemotherapy

in order to prevent side effects and

then get an antibody therapy against

this one target

so this patient surprisingly lift then

not for three months

not for six months but for two years

and with quite a good life quality so

this is a success story

where biobanks can play very

instrumental role

and we of course need to learn from

these success stories even so

there are also other stories which are

more sad

but we need to learn together in this

interdisciplinary approach

now in contrast to health care

integrated biobanks we have

population-based biobanks and

they work with healthy individuals so

they invite from the population

healthy people to come to the biobank to

get basically analysis

from top to toe so it can be that you

analyze laboratory diagnostics routinely

you do chest x-ray or you do a scan of

the brain

and more and more then we facilitate

even genomics medicine so we do genome

analysis of the dna

and by that biobanks can support

research on population-based diseases

such as heart failure

or diabetes and with this genomics

medicine we can come up with even more

risk assessments for this

individual person to say well you have a

high risk to develop

later in life diabetes and you might

want to change the luck your lifestyle

in order to prevent

getting diabetes so this is another

example where biobanks can be really of

help and support

now the third example of related to

human health are human bi-monitoring

biobanks and they

try to tackle how the chemical pollution

of our environment is affecting our

health and we can obtain

chemical pollution through our food

through our

water by medications

by radiation by smoke

and any other toxins in our environment

and i think that these

human biomonitoring biobanks are still

underrepresented and this will be

a field of research where biobanks will

be much

more important in the near future of

course

toxins don’t only hurt us they also hurt

the plants themselves and in order to

prevent

the biodiversity of plants which can be

impacted by

global warming we hear it about it it

can be

by monocultures industrialization but

also toxins

there are biobanks of plants who try to

preserve this biodiversity of crops

by having field gene banks by having

and vitro gene banks or cryobanks

and you will be amazed to realize that

we have more than 400 botanical gardens

worldwide

who basically preserve crops and we have

more than 1

700 agricultural biobanks

who give basically preservation or

access to more than

7 million accessions of crops

this is really amazing but of course

there are also specific biobanks who

tackle not individual

like plants but they basically try to

support the entire environment research

and these are environmental biobanks

and they try to understand how pollution

impacting or

the climate change or the melting of the

polar ice is influencing our entire

ecosystem

or specific regions

now this brings me to the another topic

because melting of the polar

ice is actually impacting the habitant

of the polar bear and

wildlife biobanking is about preserving

also biodiversity of our

animals and especially those one were

endangered and here you see on the slide

behind me one of our pioneers

in wildlife biobanking biopreservation

who’s taking a blood sample

from a white rhinoceros in order to

facilitate genomics medicine or genomics

research and also

disease monitoring of this endangered

species

but furthermore wildlife biobanking

means also providing

siemens for breeding programs in

cooperation with seuss where we have

protected

areas for these breeding processes

and furthermore this picture i love

especially because it shows how we

engage with the public

and even educate our future generations

about the challenges we have and we try

to tackle today

so with this said i hope that i could

convince you that biobanking is

really highly interdisciplinary most

interesting challenging and rewarding at

once

but is also able to support our world

making it healthier i think it’s really

important to understand that biobanks

work across the world in networks

to make full use of all our collections

and i really would like to invite you

also to let’s make our lifestyles here

make new treatments possible but let’s

not forget

about that we have the responsibility to

protect

basically all biodiversity in our world

and and our planet itself

thank you very much for listening if

you’re interested reach out to me

afterwards

thank you