The National Taiwan University (NTU) Hospital plans to launch Taiwan's first "biobank" as a means of boosting medical research and treatment, but the project faces problems of funding and a lack of widespread participation, doctors said yesterday.
"A biobank is a place to store samples, an information-sharing center. It is absolutely, essentially needed," said Chang Chi-jen (
A biobank is essentially a database that stores patient samples, including tissue samples, serum and genetic information, for the purpose of medical research. The biobank could also house patient information, follow-up records and other relevant data.
According to surgeon Yang Ching-yao (
"In the past, when doctors or researchers needed to access certain types of data, it was not a problem of time; the problem was that you couldn't even find the data. This new system [the biobank] would make searching for data much more efficient," said Chen Chiung-nien (陳炯年) of the NTU Hospital Department of Surgery.
The biobank is the brainchild of NTU College of Medicine professor Hsieh Fon-jou (
"Infrastructure is tomorrow's medicine. The first priority of Taiwanese scientific development is infrastructure," Hsieh said, explaining that the NTU biobank could serve as a "common language" between different medical institutions and allow for "data fusion."
"We could continue to build upon the biobank indefinitely. [Its scope] could be as small as one hospital department or as large as all hospitals," Hsieh said.
However, doctors yesterday admitted that as of yet, no other hospitals were using the biobank software interface that had been chosen by the NTU. They said this could change after a discussion was held yesterday about the possibility of data integration via the proposed biobank.
Another setback is the biobank's meager funding, doctors said.
"The biobank is funded by an existing Ministry of Economic Affairs research fund which encompasses a total of 15 projects. The biobank itself has allocations of a few million NT dollar, of which the software system itself takes up more than NT$100,000," Yang said.
International biobank plans have been on a much more ambitious scale -- reports put estimates for the initial funding of the UK's biobank, which aims to collect up to half a million samples, at roughly NT$ 3.5 billion.
While the implications of a large-scale database of biomedical information have proven to be highly controversial in other countries, NTU doctors have yet to set in stone guidelines regarding information access or ownership.
"There are a lot of issues. Can this gene be patented? Will this affect insurance? If a certain gene is linked to some disease, it could affect whether a person can be insured," Yang said, explaining that these issues had to be cleared up before the NTU could publicly announce breakthroughs in genetic research.
The project, if successful, will also be of commercial interest -- Chen said that in the future, access to the database would most likely be sold.
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