Financial Sustainability of Biobanks: From Theory to Practice.

Iwould like to thank everyone for their participation in this international roundtable and to thank Biopreservation and Biobanking for its support. This roundtable is an experiment. Hitherto, scientists have only discussed the question of economic sustainability of biobanking with each other and perhaps with our funders, but, here, perhaps for the first time, a group of economists is speaking with and to scientists. Can their expertise help us, scientists, to find a long-lasting solution to the problem of sustainability in biobanking? Let us first locate biobanking. It takes place in the research cycle. This is often considered to comprise three stages: (1) frame your testable hypothesis; (2) test your hypothesis; and (3) modify your hypothesis for further testing. Biobanking sits in the second stage of this cycle. It is responsible for four steps that enable the hypothesis to be tested. In these steps, resources—human samples—are accrued, processed, stored, and retrieved. This resource management is an active research topic in its own right and so biobanking is primarily a research activity—not a service activity. Resource management is less complex in other areas of science. An astronomer only needs access to the sky at night. A particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider only needs access to a bottle of compressed hydrogen, but biobankers make samples accessible after a series of complex operations for all the types of resources that they manage: bacteria, fungi, seeds, plants, animal models, viable tissue, and, of course, human blood, urine, other liquids, and tissue. Health research biobanks exist either within research organizations or within private companies, but their sustainability is discussed as a problem just for research organizations. By chance or by design, biobanking has been made the subject of an experiment in funding. This ongoing transnational experiment is to test the hypothesis that biobanking can be undertaken at no overt direct cost to research funders. The idea of zero cost—of something for nothing— holds a certain attraction. If this cost recovery hypothesis is true, then biobanking would be sustainable financially even if the consequence is that new transaction costs are introduced and that a scientific price would be paid (e.g., risks to quality and to scientific innovation in biobanking). If the hypothesis is false, then a bigger scientific price would be paid. This latter possibility has led some funders to exclude highly prestigious biobanks from the experiment—UK Biobank, for example. So, the questions to which biobankers need answers are as follows: