Would biobank sharing lead to cures for diseases?
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Greg Simon is the president of a company called FasterCures, which says it wants to help speed up the development of cures for many diseases.
Greg Simon: A biobank for research on humans is a repository that stores and distributes and maintains DNA, tissue, blood, blood serum.
FasterCures hosts an online portal called BioBanks Central. Its goal is to connect biobanks around the world.
Greg Simon: Right now, unfortunately, many people treat their hospital, their institution, their research lab’s biobank as a very propriety resource. They don’t like to tell you what’s in it until they have a chance to do their own research on it. And that can delay the access to the tissue for a long time.
Because human tissue has a short shelf life, that delay might mean the sample is wasted.
Greg Simon: And if you had a biopsy of a breast tumor or prostate cancer, the last thing you’d ever want to know is that nobody used it to further the development of a cure.
The European Union expects to create a widespread network of biobanks. Simon believes that we in the U.S. would benefit from a similarly shared system.
Greg Simon: People too often view their tissue collection as a lottery ticket. Somewhere in the collection is some really valuable information and when we discover it we’ll be able to patent something and make a lot of money. That’s the wrong way to think about it. We need to think about these collections as a mutual fund-we’re all in it together and there may be 100 different things that we’re going to look at. We don’t need all 100 to work, but if only one of them works, we all share in it together.
