Via Nature News & Comment: Proposed Ebola biobank would strengthen African science. Excerpt:
As West Africa’s Ebola outbreak winds down, an effort is under way to make the best use of the tens of thousands of patient samples collected by public-health agencies fighting the epidemic. On 6–7 August, the World Health Organization (WHO) convened a meeting in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to discuss how to establish a biobank for up to 100,000 samples of blood, semen, urine and breast milk from confirmed and suspected Ebola patients, as well as swabs taken from the bodies of people who died from the virus.
Held by health agencies in both West Africa and the West, the samples could be valuable in understanding how the current Ebola crisis evolved, preparing for future outbreaks and developing public-health research capacity in a region that depends on outside experts.
“There are many, many ways that this resource could be precious,” says Cathy Roth, an adviser to the WHO directorate in Geneva, Switzerland, which arranged the meeting as part of a series of international discussions about the creation of an Ebola biobank.
One of the difficulties is that there is no blueprint for how such a biobank would work, so countries have not yet committed to joining it.
One proposal has been to link existing collections in an online biobank with a reference laboratory in Africa that would hold certain samples — for instance, collections taken from notable groups of patients, or from people who were followed especially closely throughout the course of their disease. Such a facility would be a first for the region; there is currently no high-containment lab in the Ebola zone that is suitable for studies of live, highly dangerous viruses.
Although the samples vastly outnumber those collected in previous outbreaks, they are still a finite resource. Ongoing discussions will need to grapple with who decides what the samples can be used for and what kinds of research should be emphasized.
