Biobanking

Biobanks are entities ensuring the management and preservation of biological resources, such as biological fluids or tissues of human origin, living cells, microbes, and their associated data. The major objective of biobanks is to preserve these resources in optimal conditions to maintain their integrity and make them available to the scientific community to both advance research and knowledge worldwide, and facilitate the identification of biomarkers and the development of innovative drugs, vaccines or diagnostic tests.

In this MOOC, different aspects of acquisition, processing, and preservation of different types of biological resources are discussed. Specificities of human and microbial biobanking are mentionned. Several sessions are devoted to the quality assurance of these biobanks to meet international standards.

This MOOC is composed of 4 teaching chapters, the first on general considerations, the second on biospecimen and data science and the third on international, legal and ethical issues, and finally, the fourth on practical examples. Each chapter has 4 to 7 sequences. Each sequence consists of videos of 10-20 minutes and a MCQ so that students can test their knowledge. The videos are in English with French, spanish and English subtitles.

The videos in the MOOC are all subtitled, in both English and French. Their playback speed can be accelerated or slowed down to suit your needs.

The subtitles are also grouped together in a text format for each video: these are the transcripts, accessible under each video.

Finally, more and more MOOCs also include what we call the BOOC. This is a PDF document containing all the transcripts, to which images and diagrams have been added to aid understanding. The BOOC can be downloaded.

This course is available in English and French.

*Access to this course requires the user to register or create an account on the course platform.