Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
UK Biobank's 500,000-participant prospective cohort.
- Is an instance
FinnGen's combination of genomic data with Finnish national health registries.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A pathology archive used solely for clinical care, not research, is not a biobank in the research sense.
- Not an instance
A bioinformatics database of public sequences is not a biobank — there are no physical samples.
Editorial commentary
Biobanks vary in scale from small disease-specific collections to large population biobanks (UK Biobank, FinnGen, All of Us). They typically combine physical sample storage (freezers, LN2 tanks) with structured datasets, donor-consent records, and access committees that approve research uses. Modern biobanks are increasingly federated (BBMRI-ERIC catalogue) and increasingly co-host genomic and other -omics data alongside the physical samples. Consent governance, recontact rules, and broad vs. specific consent are central operational questions.
References
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Also known as
Population biobank · Disease biobank
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Biobank"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/biobank" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "Biobank",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/biobank",
"description": "An organised collection of biological samples (typically human samples such as blood, tissue, DNA, urine) together with their associated clinical, demographic, and lifestyle data, governed for use in biomedical research.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-data-infrastructure/",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/biobank",
"sameAs": [
"Population biobank",
"Disease biobank"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
