CIBERER BIOBANK

According to the definition given in the Biomedical Research Act 14/2007, a biobank is “a public or private non-profit-making establishment which has a collection of biological samples intended for diagnostic purposes or biomedical research and organized as a technical unit with criteria involving quality, order and allocation”.

CIBERER BIOBANK, hereinafter CBK, is a public-non-profit-making biobank set up by the Center for Biomedical Network Research on Rare Diseases (CIBERER) and located at the Fundación para el Fomento de la Investigación Sanitaria y Biomédica de la Comunitat Valenciana (FISABIO). Through being an integral part of the CIBERER, the Biobank has the institutional backing of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III.

The CBK centralizes the reception of high quality human samples connected with rare diseases in Spain. It also actively involves the research or healthcare professionals who send the samples and disseminates these among national and international research groups in rare diseases. It thus guarantees the scientific repercussion of the samples received.

On the Catalogue section included in this portal, you may find a listing of biological samples available at the CBK to those researchers interested in filing a request.

The CBK forms part of the structure of the CIBERER, one of the eleven thematic areas included in the CIBER Consortium set up under the auspices of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III. It was created to act as a reference, coordinate and promote excellence research into rare diseases in Spain. El CIBERER consists of sixty-two research groups, attached to several institutions in the Consortium, including universities, hospitals, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) centers and other Public Research Bodies. Its objective is to become a center where priority and encouragement is given to collaboration and cooperation between basic and clinical research groups. Special stress is placed on the fields of genetic, molecular, biochemical and cellular research into genetic or acquired rare diseases. El objetivo del CIBERER's aim is to improve knowledge on epidemiology and the causes and mechanisms producing rare diseases.

This research is the foundation on which new tools are provided for diagnosis and therapy into rare diseases, fostering translational research between the scientific medium of the laboratory and the clinical field of healthcare centers.

According to the European Union definition, rare, minority, orphan or low prevalence diseases are pathologies with a risk of death or chronic invalidity which have a prevalence of fewer than 5 cases per 10,000 inhabitants, which means a group of from 5-7% of the population in developed countries and over 3 million people affected in Spain.

In this context, the CBK was founded with the aim of serving diagnostic and therapeutic research, facilitating the availability of high quality biological material to carry this out. It also sets out to solve one of the main problems coming up in research into this type of pathologies: the dispersion of samples due to the low prevalence of rare diseases. This point is of special relevance at a time when the proliferation of different biobanks could hinder the concentration of cases required to carry out research into rare diseases. This is the reason for the importance of setting up a biobank of samples of rare diseases and giving this suitable diffusion among professionals involved in health care for these pathologies.