Perspectives on tissue biobanking for personalized medicine

Abstract

The increased use of biospecimens/biobanks to address selection of specific therapies for individual patients based on their genomic and proteomic profiles, has led to the development of several issues in the conduct of biomarker and translational research. While there are significant benefits to patients, the increased utilization of biobanks for biomarker research has raised ethical, technical, regulatory, and operational considerations that require special attention by the biomarker/translational research community. Researchers pursuing such efforts should be aware of these complexities and use biospecimens appropriately to drive new directions and therapies for human diseases in various therapeutic areas.