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.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

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

Hewitt R., Watson P., 'Defining biobank', Biopreservation and Biobanking 11(5), 2013.

Also known as

Population biobank · Disease biobank

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Biobank"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/biobank" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/biobank",
  "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/data-infrastructure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/biobank",
  "sameAs": [
    "Population biobank",
    "Disease biobank"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:21",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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