Institutional CIBIO seminar series - 2nd seminar: Marialuisa Lavitrano

Venue: Edificio Povo 2, via Sommarive nr. 9, Povo (Tn) - Room B103
Hour: 2.00 p.m.

• Marialuisa Lavitrano - BBMRI.it, Università Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo n.1, Milano

Biobanks are repository created to safeguard our most valuable asset, biological samples, that would be used for research. Imagine the power of thousands or even millions of samples ! Biological resources – living organisms, cells, genes, and related information – are the essential raw material for the advancement of biotechnology, human health, and research and development in life sciences. The Italian node (BBMRI.it) of the European Research Infrastructure for Biobanking and BioMolecular Resources (BBMRI-ERIC), established in 2013, is a distributed research infrastructure including Biobanks located throughout Italy and a large community of researchers implicated in disease-oriented projects that relies on the use of collections of biological resources. BBMRI.it i supported by the National Institute of Health and CNR and includes 18 Universities, 23 IRCCS (Institutes of health care and research), 40 Hospitals, 12 patient associations and 90 Biobanks, Biological Resources Centres and Collections organized in thematic networks and regional networks with a matrix architecture. Specific strength of BBMRI.it is: number and quality of the Italian biobanks; link between basic biomedical research and clinical care in the IRCCS network; close collaboration with patient associations, bio-industries and regional authorities; thematic networks of excellence. The main goals of BBMRI.it are i) to take Italian collections of biological resources, biobanks and networks to a new level of coordination and efficiency, ii) to supply new common services for the community of biobanks, iii) to provide better access for users from public and private sector. To reach these goals BBMRI.it set up Common Services. The CS IT created the IT infrastructure adopted the BBMRI-ERIC standards and created the national IT infrastructure developing tools to improve interoperability of research databases. The CS Quality has been implemented, with the objectives of monitoring biobanks and bio-molecular resources, providing information on guidelines/best practices, harmonizing operational procedures, developing criteria for the accreditation and certification of biobanks, implementing the quality management system criteria of BBMRI-ERIC in the Italian network, promoting training on the issues of quality. The CS ELSI works at the service of all stakeholders to ensure ethical and legal compliance and It’s a real liaison between the national node and the European infrastructure on the ELSI state of art