The HUB-ICO-IDIBELL Biobank responds to the pandemic and creates a collection of COVID-19 samples for research

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and the impact on health at the international level, has highlighted the need to promote research to obtain associated biological and clinical information for the development of treatments that help to mitigate the widespread contagion scenario.

The HUB-ICO-IDIBELL Biobank in collaboration with the Bellvitge University Hospital (HUB) and IDIBELL launched in March the prospective collection of the COVID-19 biobank, consisting of sera, plasmas, DNA and RNA from patients confirmed for SARS-CoV-2 to make it available to the scientific community. In addition, the HUB-ICO-IDIBELL Biobank participates in the processing and preservation of samples from competitive COVID-19 projects and in various clinical trials. For this reason, various prospective and restricted circuits have been activated in which the extractions of the samples of the COVID-19 patients are scheduled and sent to the Biobank for processing and preservation. IDIBELL has created a COVID-19 Committee that will help evaluate the transfer of COVID-19 biobank samples to high impact research projects.

The Biobank also offers support services to researchers in ethical and legal compliance aspects in the use of human samples in research.

We remember the importance of:

Obtain the I.C. biobank for samples in biobank or project surplus.
Declare the collections of human samples of the project or research line to the ISCIII and the Scientific Direction of IDIBELL.

The HUB-ICO-IDIBELL Biobank is part of the National Network of Biobanks (RNBB), made up of 39 institutions from all over Spain, an initiative of the Carlos III Health Institute that provides added value to the set of Spanish biobanks and which has the objective of providing high-level scientific, technical and technological support to research projects in health and technologies sciences, as well as encourage innovation in health technologies, by supplying a wide variety of human biological samples and associated data from excellent quality.

At this time when it can be expected that the pandemic will continue to be one of the main concerns in the coming months, the HUB-ICO-IDIBELL Biobank will continue working to offer these samples to the scientific community.

For more information about the prospective sample circuit and the services offered by the Biobank as well as to check the availability of samples to the RNBB, you can contact the Biobank HUB-ICO-IDIBELL at biobanc@idibell.cat.

Last but not least, we wanted to thank all the healthcare and support staff at the Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge and the Duran i Reynals Hospital for their involvement and collaboration with the Biobank HUB-ICO-IDIBELL. Likewise, thank the researchers at the Bellvitge Campus for their trust.