SWElife Nation-wide implementation of hospital integrated biobanking of blood and other fluid samples 2

Important results from the project

Healthcare-integrated biobanking (SIB) is a national infrastructure investment to enable standardized collection of high-quality research samples throughout Sweden. For the entire project, the goal is that SIB at the end of the project is introduced at all university hospitals and is also introduced or is being established at all county hospitals in the country. During this project, one hospital has introduced SIB and two hospitals have further developed and improved their SIB, something that has brought the project one step closer to the final goal.

Expected long term effects

The effect of a full-scale introduction of SIB can lead to Sweden being successful in biobanking for research and that a nationally harmonized process leads to more studies of better quality and enables more types of analyzes to be carried out on biobanked research samples. The standardized management also leads to reduced costs for both health care and the researcher who wishes to collect samples in a study.

Approach and implementation

The project was carried out in a well-proven structure with a focus on coordination under the leadership of Biobank Sweden. Biobanks from three regions were included in the project; Uppsala, Örebro and Eskilstuna. The work lasted for about 20 months and took longer than expected, which was due to the work being significantly delayed by the ongoing corona pandemic and partly due to several additional development projects at the biobanks in parallel.