Professor Alex Felice from the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, and Center of Molecular Medicine and BioBanking spoke at the Online Training on BioBanks for Rare Disease held by the European Joint Program of the EU at the end of October entitled “Towards Innovative Research BioBanks for Rare Disease: Overcoming the Challenge".
Prof. Felice's contribution, about 'Unmet Needs in Rare Disease BioBanking' highlighted the challenges of biobank led research and the scope of biobank embedment of newborn testing for expedited diagnosis and treatment of rare disease.
The training was chaired by Professor Manuel Posada (Madrid, Spain) who is also the Chairman of EuroBioBank that was co-founded by him and Professor Felice among others.
Biomedical researchers, medical professionals and biobankers from across Europe and elsewhere who sought to approach innovative biomedical research projects on human biological samples especially focusing on rare diseases took part over the two days and four sessions of the training.
They included contributors on innovative procedures such as the roles of the European Reference Networks (E. Lopez, Spain) Brain tissue Biobanks (J. Rabano, Spain) Patient derived organoids (Organoid Hub, The Netherlands) human cell Ines in muscular dystrophy (H. Lochmuler, Ottawa, Canada) Rare Disease clinical trials (R. Kammler, Switzerland) Stem cell registries (N. Mah, Germany) and Lymphoblastoid cell lines (D.Gurwitz, Israel).
The workshop provided a valuable opportunity for interaction between the trainees and the trainers in order to promote the importance of new biobanking technologies in rare diseases research and innovative lines of research in biomedicine.