Research biobanks. A two-faced future

The possibility of preserving human tissue separated from the body, from which to extract clinical information, even on large numbers of individuals with similar clinical conditions, represents a great opportunity for the progress of biomedicine.The collection of biological materials in compliance with ethical and legal standards could be seen as the main innovation of research biobanks. Firstly, collections of samples are virtually unusable today because of the lack of detail in the informed consent or because they were catalogued following inappropriate methods. Overcoming these issues represents one of the main enhancements for the development of modern and more structured biobanks.