National Day – Germany’s Way Towards Excellence in Biobanking

Under the motto ‘National Day - Germany’s Way Towards Excellence in Biobanking’, the associate partner of ISBER, TMF, will host a pre-symposium. The event will take place on April 5 2016 and will be devoted to the promotion of human biobanks as a valuable tool for scientific medical and epidemiological research in Germany.

TMF will present aspects of its decade-long work as an academic-driven non-profit organization, particularly how TMF established a nation-wide platform for biobanking through its dedicated working group. The TMF working group has successfully facilitated interdisciplinary exchange across scientific projects and across scientific institutions with the goal to meet many organizational, legal, ethical and technological challenges of modern biomaterial-based medical research.

German biobanking is supported at different levels by the Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) which will be presented during the pre-symposium, e. g.

• the so called ‘Centralized Biobanks’ that are currently being established at selected sites of scientific medical and epidemiological research across the country,
• the recently established German Centers for Health Research and their biobanking activities,
• the German National Cohort (GNC), a joint interdisciplinary endeavor of 25 German research institutions aimed at a better understanding of common diseases through longitudinal studies of the German population, planned to run over the next 20-30 years,
• the German Biobank Node (GBN), the German central contact and coordination point for biobanking and the German contribution to the Pan-European biobanking Infrastructure enterprise, BBMRI-ERIC,
• the German Biobank Alliance, a brand-new comprehensive BMBF funding initiative for setting up a German Biobank Network as a basis for enabling German biobanks for cross-border collaboration within the context of BBMRI-ERIC.

On April 5, 2016, ‘biobankers’ from all over the world are invited to meet leading biobank experts from Germany, many of whom shall surely participate in this one-time event, the National Biobanking Day of the ISBER Annual 2016 Meeting. The pre-symposium will provide a great opportunity to build new networks and to get to know the German biobanking roadmap. The meeting will hopefully contribute to a fruitful international exchange of know-how and stimulate much scientifically rewarding collaboration.