The importance of the UDBN biobank for biomedical research

The success of the International Human Genome Project was a major milestone in modern biology. It has allowed a rapid increase in the pace of discovery of how the genes that make up our chromosomes work.

All our 23 pairs of chromosomes are made of DNA. This DNA consists of a long chain of nucleotide bases. There are four types of nucleotide base (a type of chemical made from hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen atoms) which we call A, C, G and T. The human genome sequence can therefore be written as 23 strings of these four letters. The 23 strings are about 3 billion nucleotide bases long all in all.

But every genome is different. For example, where one person has an A, another person may have a C. This variation helps to make each human unique. On average any two human genomes may differ at 1 in every 100 nucleotide bases.

Sometimes a variant nucleotide base may change the risk that a person gets a disease. So finding that variant may be important to that person and to research on that disease.  If a researcher is confident that a particular variant increases the risk of a disease in people with that variant, then the researcher will want to find out more about how this happens. In the long run, the goal of the research is to find better medicines or to find out how people with that variant can reduce their own risk of the disease. In the process of reaching those goals, researchers will inevitably discover a great deal more about human biology. So, this area of research can satisy both the need of society to look after its members and the curiousity of the individual researcher.

But the starting point for researchers is to have access to large numbers of DNA samples from people with a clinical history that has been meticulously described, where those people are happy to participate and contribute to the future welfare of others. The researchers can then find variants that are associated with some aspect of clinical history.

The Medical Research Council in the UK recognised even before the successful completion of the human genome sequence that researchers needed this type of resource of samples and data. It funded clinicians to make collections of blood and data on people with one of  13 different diseases that has a major health impact.

To speed up the work associated with this, MRC funded the UK DNA Banking Network (UDBN). At the heart of UDBN is a biobank which manages the DNA and the information associated with it. This biobank can now be accessed, via scientific collaboration, by researchers in the UK and elsewhere. Tens of thousands of samples have been used already to find genes associated with diabetes, heart disease, asthma, Alzheimer's disease, cancer etc. Those same samples are also proving to be invaluable for follow-up studies. The biobank has now increased the number of collections that it manages to include more diseases. You can see here a complete list of the disease collections which the biobank manages .

This website describe the biobank project as it stands today. It is mainly aimed at informing the scientific community of the resources available for collaborative research and helping members of the community work out what is the best experiment to do next.