Biosafety and biobanking: Current understanding and knowledge gaps

Towards a seamless product and process development workflow for recombinant proteins produced by plant molecular farming

Plant molecular farming (PMF) has been promoted as a fast, efficient and cost-effective alternative to bacteria and animal cells for the production of biopharmaceutical proteins. Numerous plant species have been tested to produce a wide range of drug candidates. However, PMF generally lacks a systematic, streamlined and seamless workflow to continuously fill the product pipeline. Therefore, it is currently unable to compete with established platforms in terms of routine, throughput and horizontal integration (the rapid translation of product candidates to preclinical and clinical development). Individual management decisions, limited funding and a lack of qualified production capacity can hinder the execution of such projects, but we also lack suitable technologies for sample handling and data management. This perspectives article will highlight current bottlenecks in PMF and offer potential solutions that combine PMF with existing technologies to build an integrated facility of the future for product development, testing, manufacturing and clinical translation. Ten major bottlenecks have been identified and are discussed in turn: automated cloning and simplified transformation options, reproducibility of bacterial cultivation, bioreactor integration with automated cell handling, options for rapid mid-scale candidate and product manufacturing, interconnection with (group-specific or personalized) clinical trials, diversity of (post-)infiltration conditions, development of downstream processing platforms, continuous process operation, compliance of manufacturing conditions with biosafety regulations, scaling requirements for cascading biomass.

Comprehensive information management system for a medical research cohort biobank based on quality by design

BACKGROUND

With the development of big health and big data, cohort research has become a medical research hotspot. As an important repository of human genetic resources, biobanks must adapt to the requirements of large-scale and efficient operation. Thus, biobanks urgently need to design and build a legal, convenient, and efficient information management system.

METHODS

This study applies the concept of "quality by design" to build a comprehensive biobank information management system based on the analysis of user requirements, legal and regulatory risks, and industry-standard requirements. The system integrates the management of scientific research projects, biological specimens, clinical information, quality control, and multi-dimensional information query and development. After 10 months of its operation, the comprehensive management system was evaluated through statistical analysis of the efficiency of the construction of the pregnancy-birth cohort and the quality of genetic resources.

RESULTS

Since the system's launch, the statistics on cohort construction efficiency show that the enrollment rate of eligible pregnant women has increased, and the rate of missing volunteers has dropped. The time needed to establish a 1000-person cohort (with complete biological samples and clinical information in early, middle, and late pregnancy) was reduced, and the effective tracking rate of the samples was 77.42%. The error rate of the deep cryogenic refrigerator decreased, with a clinical information integrity rate of 96.47%.

CONCLUSIONS

The comprehensive biobank information management system constructed with the "quality by design" concept is well suited to meet the requirements of medical research. This study provides a solution for designing a comprehensive information system for medical institutions' biobanks.

Nonhuman primates' tissue banks: resources for all model organism research

Biobanks containing tissue and other biological samples from many model organisms provide easy and faster access to ex vivo resources for a wide-range of research programmes. For all laboratory animals, collecting and preserving tissue at post-mortem is an effective way of maximising the benefits of individual animals and potentially reducing the numbers required for experimentation in the future. For primate tissues, biobanks represent the scarcest of these resources but quite possibly those most valuable for preclinical and translation studies.