The Biobanking Consensus Meeting will be hosted by yur Chief Scientific Officer, Dr David Jenkinson. This important meeting has been initiated by us and will be held at Islington’s Business Design Centre in London.
In our 2015 Research Strategy A Cure Can’t Wait, we identified the need to radically increase the number and frequency of tissue samples collected. These samples need to be made more readily available to the research community in order to accelerate research progress.
In the recent Task & Finish Working Group, The Brain Tumour Charity has been asked to lead on this important initiative.
To take the next step, we are hosting a meeting of scientists, clinicians and pathologists, joined by patient advocates and biobanking specialists as well as other interested charities to identify the best way to fill this need.
We are being joined by the Chair of the NCRI Brain Clinical Studies Group, Professor Colin Watts, as well as Dr Helen Campbell, part of the Task & Finish Working Group Secretariat, as we seek to unite the community behind this endeavour.
We will be posing a series of questions to the assembled experts throughout the day and encouraging them to reach a consensus position that the research community can align with.
At the end of the workshop, we will be in a position to understand what is needed for our community in order to achieve a successful biobank for brain tumours, which we will look to establish in 2017.