Standardization and Utilization of Biobank Resources in Clinical Protein Science with Examples of Emerging Applications

Biobanks are a major resource to access and measure biological constituents that can be used to monitor the status of health and disease, both in unique individual samples and within populations. Most “omic” activities rely on access to these collections of stored samples to provide the basis for establishing the ranges and frequencies of expression. Furthermore, information about the relative abundance and form of protein constituents found in stored samples provides an important historical index for comparative studies of inherited, epidemic, and developing disease. Standardizations of sample quality, form, and analysis are an important unmet need and requirement for gaining the full benefit from collected samples. Coupled to this standard is the provision of annotation describing clinical status and metadata of measurements of clinical phenotype that characterizes the sample. Today we have not yet achieved consensus on how to collect, manage, and build biobank archives in order to reach goals where the...