Danubian Biobank Consortium
Towards Information-based Medicine
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Danubian Biobank Consortium |
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Project summary
Project objective(s) and state of the artAging disorders related to vascular medicine and metabolic disease are of major impact for the European health care systems. The fastest growing segment in the European population is over 65, a group that utilizes three to five times more health care services than younger people. Despite the major progress in reducing death rates from heart disease and stroke, their impact on the health care system has dramatically increased in the past decades. Risk factors such as diabetes have increased significantly, even for younger people. Therefore, a comprehensive public health system strategy must address these challenges. An important step in this direction is the identification and validation of new biomarkers and risk factors in population studies. Scientific discoveries, along with new technological capabilities, will help to find and validate the specific targets, and will enable large clinical trials on new medications, along with identification of drug-drug interactions and adverse drug reactions. The introduction of the new health card in some European countries will facilitate the acquisition of precise data. It allows rapid access to exact diagnoses, lab and clinical data, and, moreover, records medication thereby allowing a more efficient identification of adverse drug reactions. A key element in the process towards good practice-based personalized medicine is the establishment of Total-Quality-Management (TQM)-based and high-throughput-system (HTS)-based biobanks. This implies the establishment of large DNA, serum, plasma and cell/tissue/RNA/protein banks concomitantly with the development of a robotics- and IT-based infrastructure to support data integration, including patient information as electronic patient records, in vitro as well as in vivo diagnostic data, genealogical records and the algorithms and tools required for biometric analysis. No single individual, institution or university alone can meet these challenges of information-based biomedicine. Thus, formation of regional networks combined with excellence in scientific expertise will be of outstanding importance. The current initiative suggests to establish the " Danubian Biobank foundation for public utility in molecular medicine of aging disorders " that networks and expands all biobanking activities and the core scientific competences of the Danubian universities, teaching hospitals and rehabilitation clinics between Ulm and Budapest and of associated collaborating regional centers in the field of non-cancer aging disorders. In this context we will address 1. vascular disease (e.g. stroke, myocardial infarction, peripheral artery disease, arterial thrombosis, kidney failure), 2. metabolic disease (e.g. obesity, metabolic syndrome), and 3. neurodegenerative disorders (e.g. dementia, parkinsonism). |
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