Europe Biobank Week

Europe Biobank Week: bringing the European biobanking community together to discuss health innovation

Brussels/Graz, 28 June 2016 – BBMRI-ERIC and ESBB are joining forces to organize a new platform for debate and collaboration on activities related to biobanking and biopreservation of samples and data for research and development, Europe Biobank Week: Biobanking for Health Innovation.

The strategic alliance of Biobanking and BioMolecular resources Research Infrastructures – European Research Infrastructure Consortium (BBMRI-ERIC) and European and Middle Eastern Society for Biopreservation and Biobanking (ESBB) is resulting in a joint congress entitled The Europe Biobank Week, which will take place from 13 to 16 September 2015 in Vienna, Austria. The theme of the congress will be health innovation.

The congress will bring together biobanking experts from all over the world to discuss the future challenges for biobanking, such as biobanking governance, participation of patients and public in biobanking, data protection and management, precision and personalized medicine, quality and integrity of samples, environmental issues, and international collaboration.

Biobanking is a specific European strength having become a fundamental component in addressing the ongoing and future requirements particularly of Europe’s health service frameworks including competitiveness and innovativeness of health-related industries.

Prof Jan-Eric Litton, Director-General of BBMRI-ERIC, said ahead of the congress: “We look forward to collaborating with our colleagues in ESBB to optimize the contribution of biobanking to health research and realizing the opportunities this will bring to personalized medicine and patient care more generally. We wish to ensure that we have the optimum policy environment to allow us to maximize the contribution of biobanking to public health.”

“Getting to the next level of biobanking will require new and innovative approaches in both thinking and acting, and fundamental changes in our approach, including ideas that go beyond an individual organization, but affect the full chain of people involved. Given the fact that the different stakeholders are already changing in the field of personalized medicine, the preconditions to make this work are there already. It should be a matter of time when this next stage can be achieved and truly personalized medicine is within reach – if we act now” added Erik Steinfelder President ESBB

The event will be organised in association with the International Biobank Summit and the BBMRI-LPC Forum Meeting 2016. BBMRI.at will serve as local organiser.

For BBMRI-ERIC, please contact:
Luc Deltombe, Communication and Finance Asst., BBMRI-ERIC
Email: luc.deltombe@bbmri-eric.eu, tel: + 43 316 34 99 17 21

For ESBB, please contact:
Robert Hewitt, Executive Offices, ESBB
Email: hewitt.r@esbb.org, tel: +44 (0)797 1170 184

For media enquiries, please contact:
Declan Kirrane, Managing Director, ISC
Email: declan.kirrane@iscintelligence.com, tel: +32 494 34 60 40

Notes to editors:

BBMRI-ERIC is a pan-European research infrastructure which provides access to quality controlled human biological samples, such as blood, tissues, cells or DNA, and associated clinical and research data. It aims to establish, operate and develop a pan-European distributed research infrastructure of biobanks and biomolecular resources in order to facilitate the access to resources as well as facilities and to support high quality biomolecular and medical research. BBMRI-ERIC operates on a non-economic basis. BBMRI-ERIC is set up as a distributed research infrastructure in most, if not all European member states. Including the United Kingdom as its latest member, BBMRI-ERIC consists as of today of 17 member states and one international organisation, making it one of the largest research infrastructures for health research in Europe.

ESBB is a society for people involved in the collection and storage of biological materials from all species. The society is focussed on Europe, the Middle East and Africa. ESBB has its origins in another society, the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER). The mission of ESBB is to advance the field of biobanking in support of research relating to healthcare, agriculture and the environment.