Biobank
The Blood Service’s biobank has been operating for five years and has rapidly collected a considerable number of samples from blood donors. These samples differ from those at other biobanks, as they are collected from healthy individuals and not from patients. The Blood Service’s biobank therefore offers unique reference material for medical research. The biobank can also provide researchers with samples customized according to genotype (e.g. HLA type samples).
By the end of 2022, the biobank already included more than 65,000 blood donors. Material from the biobank has already been released to 20 research projects, the analysis results of which have been used in a total of 92 scientific publications. More than 55,000 blood donor samples have already been used in various research projects.
In January 2023, we were one of the first biobanks to reach the goal of collecting DNA samples for the FinnGen research project. FinnGen has already yielded over 100 scientific publications, thanks to the biobank samples collected by Finnish biobanks.
The Blood Service is an administrative responsibility organization of the Finnish Hematology Registry and Clinical Biobank (FHRB). In 2022, 218 new FHRB consents were collected from haematological patients and the total number of samples stands at 3,887. In 2022, FHRB signed a collaboration agreement with the iCan project. iCan is a flagship project of the Academy of Finland coordinated by the University of Helsinki utilizing biobank samples and health-related data to develop individualized treatment methods for different types of cancer.
