New biobank will make research easier

Covers the whole of Denmark

“As the newest of these registers, the Danish National Biobank gives us the opportunity of including the biological dimension in health-related research to a far greater extent,” he says. “The biobank is unique because in time it will contain samples from a very large part of the population – researchers will be able to follow a whole country and its diseases in the registers.”

Denmark stands alone internationally with registers that include everyone living in the country, and they can be followed from cradle to grave – the only country with the whole of its population in a single cohort.

“We expect that the biobank will be a goldmine for Danish research and will be the foundation for many important discoveries in the future,” says Melbye.

More knowledge about diseases

The biobank has a 19-metre long freezer with room for seven million samples, and the latest and best in robot and laboratory equipment. (Photo: SSI)
As well as samples, the new biobank has a register with links to information in the many other health-related registers in Denmark.

This gives the biobank an enormous research advantage when researchers are looking for causal relations between diseases and treatments.

“In this type of research you can say that the individual patient doesn’t interest us,” he says. “Initially we don’t focus on the individual patient’s treatment – what interests us is the greater context among groups of the whole population.”

Register research has already given a result

Collating different registers has already yielded results. SSI researchers recently combined information from the PKU register, which houses blood samples taken from the heel of all babies born in Denmark over the past 30 years, with information from the national patient register, which contains data from patients’ contact with the health sector since 1977. Here they discovered three genetic variants that play a vital role in the development of pyloric stenosis, an intestinal disease that is the most common cause of operations among infants.

Biobank with room for 15 million samples

The Danish National Biobank will in time house 15 million biological samples, but at the start it will have the five to six million samples already at the disposal of the State Serum Institute.

The new biobank will also contain:
• Samples from 30 percent of Greenland’s population, and from the whole of the populations of the Faroe Islands and Iceland
• 3-4 million samples from Danes whose blood has been sent to SSI for micro-biological tests
• 225,000 blood samples from 100,000 pregnant women
• Samples from 5,000 patients with testicular cancer
• Samples from 1,500 patients with anal, rectal, vulvar or penis cancer

The biobank receives about 1,000 new samples every day, and Melbye hopes that the Danish National Biobank will collaborate with other laboratories in the future, so it will receive even more samples.

International attention

The international scientific journal Science has described Denmark as the great dream of epidemiologists because the country’s many comprehensive registers make it easier for epidemiologists to carry out research in diseases.

By Jeppe Wojcik