Since 2015, Swelife has been supporting the introduction of public healthcare-integrated biobanking of fluid-based samples for research. This is part of our work for national scalability.
There are approximately 450 registered biobanks in Sweden, of which the vast majority are run by the counties and regions. A blood sample that is stored and documented in a biobank in a quality-assured, searchable and standardised way provides the conditions for medical research. In the long term, this can result in improved public healthcare.
A project in several stages
The first part of the project concerns the achievement of standardised management from sample-taking to freezing.
Currently, 22 hospitals have introduced public healthcare-integrated biobanking (October 2018).
Swelife also finances a pilot project on withdrawals from biobanks in three hospitals. The participating hospitals have already introduced healthcare-integrated biobanking, and they are now investigating how to efficiently withdraw samples for research from their biobanks.