Digital Biobanking and Big Data as a New Research Tool: A Position Paper

Big data analytics in medicine is driving significant change, as it offers vital information for improving functions, developing cutting-edge solutions and overcoming inefficiencies. With the right archiving and analysis tools, all players in the healthcare system, from hospitals to patients and from medical personnel to the pharmaceutical industry, can yield numerous benefits. Therefore, to analyze and interpret these analytics effectively, so that they can be useful for the advancement of scientific knowledge, we require information sharing, specific skills, training, integration between all system players, unique infrastructures and security. All these characteristics will make it possible to establish and harmonize real big data biobanks, for which it will be appropriate to consider new forms of governance compared to those traditionally conceived for large-sample biobanks.