Health or social care?

22 Twenty years ago, an internet search for the word “biobank” would have returned almost nothing; today, there are millions of results. The term biobank commonly refers to a large collection of tissue samples (with associated biological and medical data), such as surgical biopsies (fresh frozen or in paraffin sections), blood and serum samples, different cell types, DNA, RNA; all carefully collected for research purposes.1 The science of biobanking is very broad and covers collections of plant, animal, or human specimens. For the purposes of this discussion, we will focus on human biobanks.