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