Impact of biobanks on research outcomes in rare diseases: a systematic review

Monique Garcia, Jenny Downs, Alyce Russell and Wei Wang; Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases 2018 13:202 doi:10.1186/s13023-018-0942-z

Alleviating the burden of rare diseases requires research into new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. We undertook a systematic review to identify and compare the impact of stand-alone registries, registries with biobanks, and rare disease biobanks on research outcomes in rare diseases.

A list of the registries, and their association with BBs at the time the original article was published, can be found in this paper. There were, however, small RDBBs that had collected only 50 samples (such as the Friedrich’s Ataxia fibroblast repository). Li et al. reported that smaller RDBBs have their advantages over larger RDBB networks in the sense that they can focus on a single diseases or syndromes, or group of diseases, and can successfully accumulate significant numbers of cell lines, whilst developing an intimate understanding of the disease

Impact of biobanks on research outcomes in rare diseases: a systematic review