The Danubian Biobank Project

The Danubian Biobank Consortium (www.danubianbiobank.de) was initiated in 2005 as 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 diseases, Type2-diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases. 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 mission of the Danubian Biobank Consortium is to directly integrate biobanking into local and regional healthcare along the Danube through E-health portal structures and IT-based strategies. Biobanking as an integral part of the workflow of the healthcare 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, combined with local and regional biobanking facilities under common Good Practice (GP) and Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) conditions to move existing healthcare systems towards personalized healthcare. This process will be driven by local E-health portal implementation to network healthcare 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) to implement a central IT-based databank in phase H, 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 three regional DNA, plasma, and tissue banks in Regensburg, Vienna, and Budapest store samples and encrypted patient data for scientific purposes.