Publicly funded Biobanks & IPRs in Translational Medicine: - Challenges, Opportunities & Alternatives

Publicly funded biobanks are typically constructed to operate for a long period of time and to be used by several research projects and. Thus they are often referred to as research infrastructures rather than research projects. The increasing importance of biobanks in an era of rapid advances in translational medicine inevitably raises the important question of how to deal with intellectual property rights (IPRs) that might arise out of the creation and/or later use of such biobanks. This presentation will explain the basic concept of IPRs and how they relate to biobanks. Moreover, it will discuss various choices, opportunities and challenges that will have to be considered not only by the operators of biobanks, but also by end-users and stakeholders.


The workshop is jointly organized by: - Biobank Standardisation and Harmonisation for Research Excellence in the European Union (BioSHaRE-EU, www.bioshare.eu), - The “Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure” project (BBMRI, www.bbmri.eu), - The Public Population Project in Genomics and Society (P3G, www.p3g.org), - The Large Prospective Cohorts BBMRI-LPC project, - The HeLEX Centre (http://www.publichealth.ox.ac.uk/helex/), - Biobank Norway (www.biobanknorway.no) - The Data to Knowledge for Practice Centre, University of Leicester.