So, what’s a biobank actually for?

“The timeline for our work is very long,” explains De Grandi, a geneticist from Bolzano who, after years of experience around the world, returned home and coordinated the creation of the biobank. “The oldest samples we keep here are from the MICROS study, which collected samples from around 1,500 people in the Vinschgau/Venosta valley in South Tyrol back in 2002. The CHRIS population study, in fact the large-scale evolution of MICROS, now has more than 13,000 participants. This actually means that we have around thirty years’ worth of data, and there will be other new initiatives that continue from here in the future. Having said that, samples can theoretically be stored and analyzed forever”.

The separated blood fractions are then placed in the most suitable freezers: entire blood cells and white blood cells as well as platelets go into the tanks which have the lowest temperature: over -150 °C, red blood cells and plasma go into the freezers at a slightly higher temperature of around -80 °C. Urine samples also go here, about ten tubes per person. With a few hours of work and about €500 in costs, including staff expenses, all the materials that relate to one person are secured.
De Grandi is evidently proud of the huge effort that went into setting up the facility, which opened in 2015, and in creating the semi-automated process currently being used to organize the samples. But he is not entirely satisfied just yet.
“We aren’t stamp collectors,” he laughs. “My worry is the samples that have not yet been analyzed. I would like each one of them to be useful.”

Geopolitics affects the international collaborations.
For instance, exchanges with the United States were not possible until this summer because there is no clear law there that limits the links between data and subjects, a stark contrast to the Italian privacy guarantor which is particularly restrictive. And though an agreement has been in force since July 2023, it is still being debated.
The United States, as well as other countries, have repeatedly been accused of predatory attitudes towards minority populations or poor countries having allegedly hoarded biological samples and data and employing protocols that are not entirely transparent and which is referred to as biocolonialism.
Often lucrative offers for laboratory services such as genome sequencing arrive also in Bolzano from China but are declined because the costs of less than solid guarantees on the handling of personal data simply are not worth the price.
“We cannot rely solely on trust between those involved in research, we need clear rules,” concludes De Grandi. “But exchanges are not an option, they are a necessity. What does the future hold? I see a decisive role for biobanks in the study of oncogenes, the genes associated with cancer.”