Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Thomas Illig, head of the central biobank of the Hannover Medical School, the Hannover Unified Biobank (HUB), has a longstanding and profound expertise in genetics and genomics, molecular epidemiology, biomarker research, preventive medicine approaches, omics technologies, biobanking research and bioinformatics. T. Illig is author on more than 720 peer-review articles. According to a recent analysis of Thomson & Reuter, T. Illig is one of the worldwide most cited researchers in the fields of molecular biology & genetics. He is speaker of the Lower Saxony Omics and bioinformatics initiative TRAINomics. T. Illig is member of the Steering Committee of the German Biobank Network (GBN). Moreover Prof. Illig is speaker of the Biobank HUB of the German network for university medicine (NUM). His strong ties to the framework of GBN ensure that quality standards and solutions for sample and sample-data preparation and storage will be harmonized to national and international standards.

Biobanking as a basis for integration of molecular data in complex diseases.

Advances in the “omics” field bring about the need for a high number of good quality samples. Additionally the access to high quality biosamples and related clinical data is a basic prerequisite for advanced biomedical research. Many omics studies take advantage of biobanked samples to meet this need. Most of the laboratory errors occur in the pre-analytical phase. Therefore evidence-based standard operating procedures for the pre-analytical phase as well as markers to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quality samples taking into account the desired downstream analysis are urgently needed. Advances in analytical biochemistry have recently made it possible to obtain global snapshots of metabolism. Especially the combination of different molecular omics techniques shows major differentiations in the metabolic make-up of the human population. Metabolites may subscribe the risk for a certain medical phenotype, the response to a given drug treatment, the reaction to a nutritional intervention, or environmental challenge.

This presentation combines  data about biobanking procedures and routines in a big professional clinical biobank and combines it with biobanking research with modern high-throughput data.