BioBanking - The Holy Grail of novel drug and diagnostic developments?

The reason for these effects of growing health care costs we are experiencing springs from several changes and developments, such as increased patient demands, patient awareness of quality of life, and an increasing global population. Last but not least, the increasing number of elderly people, and the health care implications for future technology developments, are challenges that we need to address in order to be able to be pro-active and build a future plan that meets the resources that will become evident with time. These future developments were recently highlighted in a"White Paper" by representatives from Pharma industry, academic research institutes, companies that are technology platform providers and medical health institutions in Japan, a country with an expected elderly population of 40% in 2050, [1].We have reached a point where the bioinformatic developments have given us the basis for taking on the sequencing of the "Human Proteome", that is coded by the genome, ever since the last decade when the Human Genome Project was announced by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, as a scientific milestone. The gene centric Human Proteome Project (HPP) approach was recently initiated by HUPO, at the 9th World Congress in Sydney, 2010, where research teams established chromosome consortia. The start of this HPP chromosome initiative will need major effort and builds within the UniProt database, as well as establishment of novel informatic tools that can aid in delivering on the sequence content of the Human Proteome. Given this upcoming scientific milestone challenge ahead of us, the logical question at hand is: What is the best way forward in getting clinical and disease understanding with the gene coded protein sequences at hand?One important opportunity could be the current activities on building Biobank archives. Currently, there are major interests and dedicated projects with substantial resources to build biobanking facilities around the world. Biobanks hold archi