Located in hospitals, universities, nonprofit organizations, and pharmaceutical companies, biobanks play a quiet but crucial role in health care. Like libraries of the human organism, they archive a wide range of biospecimens—including blood, hair, sperm, saliva, plasma, whole organs, and purified DNA—to use in research and experimentation. From drug development to assisted reproduction, progress in dozens of fields would be impossible without biobanks. They are the biological back end of data-driven medicine.
When the NCI drew up its plans for the atlas, dozens of bio-repositories in the US assured the institute that at least 500 samples of each type of tumor could be provided easily. Once the project was under way, however, the researchers got a series of bruising reality checks…
…The industry’s response to these revelations was a series of cautious upgrades. Adding a dose of enzymatic inhibitors to the preservative mix can reduce unexpected bouts of cell death but does nothing to eliminate DMSO toxicity. Chilling tissue at a carefully controlled rate immediately after harvesting (using a technique appropriated from Eskimos in the early 1900s by Clarence Birdseye, father of the frozen-food industry) reduces the need for toxic antifreeze but requires disruptive changes in the routine of overworked hospital staff.
These incremental solutions are hardly enough to make up for a long period of complacency. “We got stuck for about 20 years,” says Allison Hubel, a cryopreservation expert at the University of Minnesota. “People assumed that things like DMSO were one-size-fits-all solutions. If you have the perception that all the big problems in a field have been solved, there’s no motivation for funding.”