Biobanking

Our institute is involved in developing cutting-edge biobanking infrastructures in order to increase cooperation and harmonisation of processes.

The Health Data Research Hub of the Medical University of Innsbruck addresses the need for a centralized hub to facilitate data-driven research by enabling efficient secondary use of patient data, supporting areas such as clinical research, image and biosignal processing, genetics, multi-omics data, clinical epidemiology, and ML/AI methods.

The Health Data Research Hub aims to drive excellence in data-based medical research, ensuring efficient and future-proof processes while meeting the high standards of ethical, legal, and technological patient data security.

Since 2014, the local research team at the Institute has worked on establishing common guidelines for the collection of human bio-samples and on data management, in order to implement a university-wide, state-of-the-art biobanking infrastructure at the Medical University of Innsbruck (MUI).

At present, several independent, decentralised collections of human biomaterials are located in various institutions of the MUI. Based on the approval of the local ethics committee, most of these separate sample collections are linked to pseudonymised, detailed clinical data. The project aims to integrate archived bio-specimens with clinical and molecular data in a collaborative environment that emphasises scientific insights whilst ensuring security and compliance. An upcoming issue will be the digitalisation of FFPE slides. In addition, a comprehensive biobank management system will be launched in order to support researchers with collection, sample and quality management tasks. The software will enable users to integrate patient materials, clinical, specimen, genetic and molecular assay data, in order to deliver a holistic, unified view; it facilitates data exploration and hypothesis-driven research without extra programming or IT support. Multi-level user access controls ensure that all collaborators can work effectively, whilst ensuring compliance with patient consent and maintaining regulatory guidelines.

As the second part of this project, the team in Innsbruck is working on a reference model for sample and data collections as cutting edge light-house (LHC) for other sample collectors and users. In this context, a LHC criteria catalogue and an assessment process is being established in cooperation with the other Medical Universities in Austria (Graz, Linz, Wien).

Within the BBMRI Common Service IT, several tools are currently developed to ensure the findability of international biobanking and biomolecular resources (BBMRI Directory, BBMRI Negotiator) in order to facilitate access to biobanks for potential researchers and industrial users. Our team is responsible for a systematic and interactive feedback process of the user interfaces and functionalities based on human-centred usability engineering approaches. Issues to be addressed include user’s learnability and memorability. The identified design issues derive recommendations for designers and developers to improve future designs of the BBMRI Tools, but also for developers of similar online biobank catalogues.