From the Editor's Desk

It is convenient to talk about the biobanking community when referring to people involved in the growing field of biobanking. To give a very broad definition, the biobanking community is a group of people who network to share advice and information about biobanking for therapeutic, research, and other purposes and who collaborate to advance the biobanking field and overcome its unique challenges. These challenges are not only scientific and technical, but also regulatory, ethical, and managerial. The biobanking community comprises a very wide range of individuals. Members include people who manage biobanks, as well as people like clinicians, scientists, and patients/donors who provide biobanks with samples and data. Members also include the vendor organizations that design and produce the equipment, consumables, and software on which biobanks depend, as well as medical, scientific, informatic, legal, and ethical experts who provide guidance on how to improve biobank management. While the name “biobanking community” might give the impression that we all form a single harmonious group, it should be emphasized that this is not entirely true. In fact, the biobanking community includes many different subgroups, defined by different organizations or societies, that differ not only in their geographic spread, but also in their focus of interest, their mode of organization, and in many other respects. Some of these subgroups may even function quite independently.

The formation of cohesive groups has always been a part of human nature: At least one reason is that there is strength in numbers and that is good for survival. In more primitive cultures, we refer to these groups as tribes, while in the modern westernized world we refer to the analogous groups as nations, ethnic groups, organizations, societies, companies, and clubs, as examples. According to Seth Godin, author of the popular management book, Tribes, “A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.” He goes on to describe how the internet has had a profound effect on our ability to form tribes, how tribes are becoming more numerous and often more specialized, and how they may now extend globally because, in a sense, the internet has eliminated the constraints of geography. All of this seems to make sense when we think about groups and subgroups in the field of biobanking. Despite the dramatic effects of the internet on global communications, there are a number of reasons why organizations are not all extending globally.

One reason is that communities in given geographic regions will have their own unique shared interests and they may want to communicate in their own language. Another reason is that face-to-face meetings continue to be important for building business relationships, and these are easier and less expensive to arrange for regional rather than global groups. Clearly, subgroups based on topics of interest or geographic location do have certain advantages, and the tendency in biobanking seems to be for more and more subgroups to appear, rather than for subgroups to merge together. It is easy to think of new biobanking societies that have appeared in recent years but less easy to think of biobanking societies that have merged together.

The problem with subgroups (and tribes) is not so much how they work internally but how they work (or fail to work) externally. While communication within the subgroup may be excellent, communication between subgroups is often poor. As a result, different subgroups may fail to even recognize the potential for cooperation and synergy. In the biobanking field, this is a major problem since cooperation on a global scale is vital. As emphasized by the Public Population Project in Genomics (P3G) group, the importance of international harmonization in biobanking is paramount, so that we can reliably exchange and share the large number of samples often required to make scientific progress. It is therefore essential that we find ways to improve communication between the different biobanking subgroups. Since it seems that subgroups are here to stay and the tendency for subgroups to merge is rather minimal, the best thing we can do is build channels of communication between the subgroups. A number of approaches have been taken so far. One approach is to have an organization that integrates multiple subgroups: International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER) provides an example of this since it caters to the full range of biorepositories and brings them together in a forum that focuses on cross-cutting issues of common interest. In recognition of the need for geographic subgroups, ISBER has started to form regional chapters within the parent organization. Another approach is to hold joint meetings: For example, P3G, Promoting Harmonisation of Epidemiological Biobanks in Europe (PHOEBE) and Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (BBMRI) have held a joint meeting bringing together the members of these different organizations. Another approach is to bring together the representatives of different subgroups into a small working group. The Forum for International Biobanking Organisations (FIBO) provides an example. The FIBO working group contains up to 3 representatives from each of a number of major biobanking organizations including BBMRI, ISBER, P3G, International Association for Research on Cancer (IARC), Asian Network for Research Resource Centers (ANRRC),and OBBR (Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research (OBBR) at the U.S. National Cancer Institute. The regular meetings of this working group help to ensure that the channels of communication between member organizations are kept open. All of these examples involve bringing together the different biobanking subgroups at face-to-face meetings and they are certainly effective in improving knowledge transfer and mutual understanding.

There is another quite different approach that looks very promising but quite simply has not been tried yet. This is to encourage all the different biobanking subgroups to start using a shared journal as a forum for discussion. The reason why this has not been tried yet is that until recently, there was no suitable journal to serve this purpose. There was no journal that provided a single “home” for publications from the wider biobanking community. Evidence for this can be seen from inspection of the biospecimen research database (http://brd.nci.nih.gov/BRN/brnHome.seam) established by OBBR: The 498 biospecimen research articles listed were spread over 119 different journals, of which the most frequent were Clinical Chemistry (6% of the total number), Journal of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry (5%) and American Journal of Pathology (5%). Clearly, no journal stands out above the rest as the “home” for articles on biospecimen research. Further evidence comes from a literature search for articles on legal and ethical aspects of biobanking: A Pubmed search for the terms “informed consent” and “biobank” brings up 61 references to journal articles in a total of 47 different journals. Of these 47 journals, the most frequent were Journal of Medical Ethics (6% of the total number), Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy (6%), Journal International de Bioethique (4%), Law and the Human Genome Review (4%), New Genetics and Society (4%), European Journal of Health Law (4%) and others. If there is any concentration of articles on ethical issues in biobanking, then it is certainly not in those journals most likely to be read by people involved in biobanking. This is unacceptable because the discussion of ethics and regulation in biobanking must include people who understand the issues at the practical level.

This journal, Biopreservation and Biobanking, aims to provide the much-needed forum for discussion of issues facing the whole field of biobanking. The name of the Journal is not the only thing that has changed recently. The scope has been expanded to include all areas from cryobiology and biospecimen research, through research and therapeutic biobanks and their management, through quality assurance, informatics and automation, to ethical, legal and social issues. In addition to our distinguished editorial board, we have added a selection of outstanding individuals as section editors who will encourage development of the Journal in all these areas. We have exciting plans for new types of articles that will encourage discussion and make the journal an important point of reference for the biobanking community. These plans will unfold in the next few issues, so be prepared for more changes! The future of the journal depends on your interest and support, so please help us in making Biopreservation and Biobanking or “BIO” into a journal that is a real asset to the whole biobanking field.