From Biobanking to Biomarkers in Vascular and Metabolic Disease

The presence of aging disorders in the fast growing population group of over 65 years in the European population is a challenge for the public health care systems in Europe. One important way to cope with this challenge is the identification of relevant novel disease genes and the control of risk factors using new technological approaches.

Life sciences and the practice of modern medicine have increasingly become information-driven disciplines. The availability of high-throughput screening technologies can rapidly screen patients for genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, lipidomic and proteomic information related to their medical condition. This expansion of technologies and informations opened new avenues to generate actional health informations and surrogate biomarkers that help to stratify patients for therapy and prognosis.

This process requires the efficient exchange of informations among all relevant stakeholders of health care through E-health portals and information-based medicine to develop health care towards personalized medicine.

The Danubian Biobank Consortium (www.danubian-biobank.de) represents a network of Danube Universities and associated partner Universities between Ulm and Budapest with a major focus on case/control studies of aging disorders like vascular and metabolic disease. Beyond case/control studies some centers also directly participate in longitudinal population based studies and population isolate studies or provide enabling technologies for these studies. The consortium is financed by local, regional and national projects and also funded by EU-grants. The mission of the Danubian Biobank Consortium is to directly integrate Biobanking into local and regional health care systems along the Danube through E-Health portal structures and IT-based strategies.

Biobanking as an integral part of the workflow of the health care process is considered as key element to generate qualified long term patient databases and health records. The major objective of the project is to generate a common central encrypted patient and sample information database to facilitate international research interactions, multicenter clinical trials and surrogate biomarker validation, combined with local and regional biobanking facilities under common Good Practice (GP) and Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) conditions to move existing health care systems towards personalized medicine. This process will be driven by local E-health portal implementation to network health care providers, industry, insurance companies, medical research and public healthcare in a Private Public Partnership (PPP) model to cover jointly the expenses. All information including patient recruitment, blood withdrawal and storage place of the samples will be saved in phase I as standardized processing procedures (SPP) for implementation, a central IT-based databank in phase II, which can be used in encrypted form for scientific project planning and investigations. In the local E-health portals the actionable health information will be also accessible for direct medical care for the authorized practitioner. In addition to local centers regional DNA, plasma, and tissue banks in Regensburg, Vienna, and Budapest store samples and encrypted patient data for scientific purposes.

The combination of in vitro diagnostics and biobanking strategies with in vivo imaging technologies is expected to become indispensable for patient care. The combination of new enabling in vitro technologies, imaging biomarkers and modern IT-based biobanks is the ultimate aim of the Danubian Biobank Consortium to apply diagnostic tools to future curative preventive medicine innovations.