Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Biobanks as a Tissue and Information Semi-Commons: Balancing Interests for Personalized Medicine, Tissue Donors and the Public Health

Ken Gatter, Oregon Health & Science University - Department of Pathology; Willamette University - College of Law, Jan. 12, 2012

From the abstract: "Personalized medicine’s promise is tantalizing. Match a patient’s specific genetic characteristics with a specific therapeutic intervention and people will be treated more effectively and with fewer side effects. It is the future of medicine, and medical centers, pharmaceutical companies and others are heavily investing in the promise. Critical to realizing this promise is patient tissue and the information derived from patient tissue. Tissue information is essential for research and for routine clinical care in personalized medicine. The most valuable tissue, whether in the research or clinical setting, includes treatment and outcomes information. Tissue also increases in value as it becomes part of a larger collection and benefits increase with collection size. The most valuable tissue collections have large sample numbers, which allow greater statistically power. Unlike tissue repositories in the past, biobanks are more than archived remnants of excised human tissue. They are organized, searchable, data rich entities that, like commercial banks, make lending decisions to qualified researchers or organizations." Read more