Les biobanques en France : enjeux et contraintes

The initial mission of the tumor biobanks was to collect and to store frozen tissue and cellular specimens in order to increase the possibilities for the diagnosis and the prognosis of tumors. In this regard, the surgical pathologists play a central role. Rapidly, it was obvious that these different fozen specimens could be an important source of biological products for scientific programms. Therefore, human biobanks have been progressively becoming structures for clinical and translational research projects in oncology. If surgical pathologists are able to evaluate the necessity to freeze a lesion, without hindering the diagnosis made in parallel from a formaldehyde fixed tissue specimen, different actors (physicians, surgeons, biologists, nurses, technicians) must be involved for the different actions existing in a tumor biobank (such as clinical and biological data recording, collect consent of patient, etc.) The Centers for biological ressources (CBR), as defined by Inserm and by the OCDE, have for mission to collect miscellaneous biological products, in particular from human origin (tissues, nucleic acids, plasma, etc.) for a research goal only. In this regard, the tumor biobanks are a particular example of CBR. However, in these latter structures, the number of samples is limited, leading the necessity to set up different networks.