Biosafety and biobanking: Current understanding and knowledge gaps

Infectious disease outbreaks, such as 'Coronavirus disease 2019' (COVID-19), can constitute major global health threats with far-reaching consequences. As outbreaks develop, the international scientific community must provide high-quality scientific research-ready biological samples to solve the existing clinical and epi-demiological questions to better combat the pandemic. Such examples are provided by dedicated biobank facil-ities, the latter collecting increasingly high volumes of biological samples. However, the more significant concentrations of infectious or potentially infectious biological materials can create a safety risk. The current short report describes the first attempt to identify the published scientific works on biobanking and safety. Three broad thematic areas have been identified: the physical security relevant to staff and sample integrity, the data safety aspects, and the governance parameters relating to the previous two. While the current publi-cations reflect a broad alignment with existing standards and best practices in the biobanking field, they also demonstrate an opportunity for further in-depth work on this field in the post-COVID-19 era.(c) 2021 Chinese Medical Association Publishing House. Published by Elsevier BV. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).