BLOG ENTRY HANDSON: BIOBANKS 2015, MILAN

From 29-31 July 2015, the annual BBMRI conference  HandsOn Biobanks 2015  took place in Milan. It was a very interesting biobank conference, organised by Prof. Marialuisa Lavitrano, (National Node Director) and her team from BBMRI.it. In the Workshop on Quality Management, experts gave lectures in the field of QA and QC in biobanking:

The Director of the French infrastructure BIOBANQUES (BBMRI.fr), Paris, Georges Dagher, discussed how the availability of high-quality biological resources is essential for the advancement of human health and relies on three pillars: The control of pre-analytical variables, the quality management of the biobanks and the quality control of samples and associated data.

Anna Sapino, Head of the Service of Surgical Pathology at the Institute for Cancer Research of Candiolo, Italy
, presented how the quality of formalin-fixed surgical tissue samples embedded in paraffin are affected by warm ischemic time, cold ischemic time, time of fixation and the time and the site for long-term archival of FFPE tissues.

The executive manager of the BRC of the National Institute for Cancer Research of Genoa, Italy, Barbara Parodi, discussed the impact of misidentified cell lines in research due to cross-contamination of human and animal cell lines where a different, faster-growing cell line is introduced into that culture.

Maria Grazia Daidone, head of the Biomarkers Research Unit and Director of the Department of Experimental Oncology and Molecular Medicine at Istituto Nazionale Tumori in Milan presented quality control for cancer biomarkers and the need for adequate control for between-laboratory and within-laboratory variability.

Maurice Bardsley is currently head of QA, at the Animal & Plant Health Agency’s Pathology Department, and Quality Manager for the European Virus Archive Global (EVAg) project, which achieved a successful response to a coronavirus outbreak (MERS) by developing a PCR assay to detect the virus in blood. Their QMS harmonisation and improvement measures aim to supply ‘gold standard’ virus products to three main fields of industrial development of vaccines, diagnostic kits and antiviral drugs.

It was my pleasure to outline how QM is becoming increasingly important for academic research. Biological resources are necessarily required to be subject to the highest quality and safety standards and have to be comparable within the BBMRI-ERIC infrastructure.

We all are looking forward to see you at HandsOn Biobanks 2016, from 27-29 September in Vienna, Austria.

Yours sincerely,

Andrea