BBMRI-ERIC Directory: 515 Biobanks with Over 60 Million Biological Samples

Biobanks¹ are well-organized repositories of biological material. They have become the fundamental resource for advancing medical research and constitute a major component of more generally understood bioresources. Yet they face a number of challenges to become more utilized on the national and global scale. These challenges range from fragmentation of data structure and sometimes even lack of availability of data,^2–4 lack of consistent quality management and traceability^5–8 to fragmentation of privacy protection regulations^9–13 and technical, organizational, and legal aspects of scalable secure storage and processing of privacy-sensitive big data.^14–16 To address the fragmentation and findability aspects, BBMRI-ERIC has released its Directory as a first IT service, providing aggregate information about the biobanks and bioresources. The Directory features a novel scalable distributed architecture, which enables updating data about changing resources in a long-term sustainable manner.