Biobanks must join forces

Martin Yuille

When I tell people I’m a biobanker, sometimes they ask: “So, where’s your bottle of Bollinger?” This is not the place to contrast bankers’ and biobankers’ lifestyles, but one important difference between their institutions is worth noting.

Banks are part of a set of institutions, networks and standards. They are massively interconnected. In contrast, biobanks are new and fragmented and so lack the cohesion and standards they need to underpin their global role in research.