Proposed Ebola biobank would strengthen African science

NATURE by Erika Check Hayden                                                                             Aug. 10, 2015
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.  Samples from the Ebola epidemic in West Africa are held by public-health agencies in the region and abroad. Daniel Berehulak/NYT/Redux/Eyevine

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.

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http://www.nature.com/news/proposed-ebola-biobank-would-strengthen-african-science-1.18158