The impact of biobanking on vaccine development

After a slow week of vaccine news -- attributable, at least in part, to the holidays -- today's New York Times Magazine has a lengthy feature on biobanking, the gathering of vast repositories of tissue samples that is becoming an increasingly significant part of clinical research. The story, titled "Taking the least of you," estimates that 307 million tissue samples are currently stored in the U.S., collected primarily from blood and tissue samples taken as part of clinical treatment. Samples can be stored for years, and many wonder whether patients fully understand that their tissues may be used for research long after their medical care is completed. It's a topic with scientific and ethical dimensions that extend far beyond vaccines, although, as the story notes, vaccination has benefited from the practice...

"Scientists and surgeons use these tissues to develop everything from flu vaccines to penis-enlargement products. They put cells in culture dishes and expose them to radiation, drugs, cosmetics, viruses, household chemicals and biological weapons and then study their responses. They remove DNA to examine it — and therefore the person it came from — gene by gene. Without those tissues, we would have no tests for diseases like hepatitis and H.I.V.; no vaccines for polio, smallpox, measles; none of the new promising drugs for leukemia, breast cancer, colon cancer. And without tissue samples, the developers of those products would be out billions of dollars."