Comments for:
A more auspicious start for the Australasian Biospecimens Network
Submitter: Heather Thorne | h.thorne@pmci.unimelb.edu.au
kConFab, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Victoria, Australia
Published January 28, 2005
In response to Karen Birmingham’s article “An inauspicious start for the US National Biospecimen Network (NBN)” (J. Clin. Invest. 113:320, 2004) we write to report on The Australasian Biospecimen Network (ABN) whose establishment has been far more straightforward than its US counterpart.
Birmingham describes how poor communication with key stakeholders, specifically the researchers whom the NBN would support, pecuniary issues between the NBN and existing extramural tissue banks as well as uncertainty regarding the NBN relationship with the NCI are creating “negativity in parts of the cancer research community.”
The imperative to network tissue collections to support medical research is no more apparent than in Australia. Tissue banking is not a new concept for Australian researchers with individual institutes being engaged in tissue banking to support local needs. As a vast land, having only one fifteenth the population of the US, Australia has unique challenges for a biospecimens network. Individual research institutions have attempted to sustain the collection and supply of tissue by themselves. Such independence is not tenable in Australia if the best research outcomes are to be generated from our limited and disparate tissue resource.
In 2001 the ABN was initiated because we recognised that a coordinated nation-wide cooperative of tissue banks was essential if we were to pursue activities designed to foster medical and public health research. In contrast to the NBN, a move toward a national tissue bank network in Australia was not made through centralized planning of major funding bodies or government agencies. Rather, it was made through the recognition amongst existing banks that cooperative efforts in tissue banking were essential if powerful cohorts of study material were to be available.
The Australian government recently funded the networking activity of the ABN with A$1.75 million over 5 years to enable the development of a single point of contact for researchers wishing to access tissue from the ABN. Consequently, the network is supported on ‘a shoe string’ as it attempts to achieve similar results to the NBN. Greater economy is achieved by utilizing existing collection and governance mechanisms. In practice, each bank retains control over recruitment of donors as well as access to and release of tissue. Despite vast distances there is a remarkable ability to exchange samples across a national network of tissue
banks, which is becoming increasingly difficult in other countries. Far-
sighted documents and harmonization of multiple state laws will further Australian’s national tissue banking effort.
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