This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on Web of Science (5)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Statistics and Research Methods  • Genetics  • Genetics, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Between Books and Clinical Trials

Francine Kauffmann, MD; Anne Cambon-Thomsen, MD

JAMA. 2008;299(19):2316-2318.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Human biological collections, biobanks, or biorepositories, defined as "an organized collection of human biological material and associated information stored for one or more research purposes,"¹ are key tools in biological research, especially in genetics, genomics, and postgenomics research. Optimizing and assessing their use are 2 major strategic objectives of scientists, patients, and health science institutions. Tracing the use of such resources is a first step on this path, but in practice it is difficult because there are no standardized operational tools. Traceability is usually associated with an individual dimension. In this Commentary, we describe the possibility of tracing the bioresources represented by entire collections.

The easiest way to trace the various uses of a given collection could be a common identifier attributed at the early stages of the collection. No such structured identifier seems to exist for biobanks, whereas it is of common use . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Recognition, Trust, and Ethics

Author Affiliations: Inserm U780, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Villejuif, France, and Université Paris-Sud, Paris, France (Dr Kauffmann); Inserm U558, Epidemiology and Analysis in Public Health, and Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France (Dr Cambon-Thomsen).

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?