Biobanks in Finland

Finland's Biobank Act was instated in 2013, and the current legislation requires official registration of all biobanks. Currently there are eleven registered biobanks in Finland, eight of which are members of the Finnish Biobank Cooperative FINBB.

FINBB's mission is to make Finnish health and biomedical research more competitive by providing researchers centralized access to the collections and services of the Finnish biobanks and their background organizations.

FINBB Member Biobanks

• Six regional hospital biobanks are owned by the respective hospital districts and universities:

  • Auria Biobank

  • Northern Finland Biobank Borealis

  • Central Finland Biobank

  • Biobank of Eastern Finland

  • Helsinki Biobank

  • Finnish Clinical Biobank Tampere

• Two cohort biobanks, one local and one nation-wide:

  • Arctic Biobank at University of Oulu

  • THL Biobank

Additionally, the Blood Service Biobank and FHRB Biobank belong to the FINBB network. Terveystalo Biobank is a FINBB collaborator.

Finnish biobanks belong to the European Biobank Infrastructure Network BBMRI-ERIC. Finnish Biobanks participate actively in implementation of the BBMRI-ERIC Work Program with specific emphasis on IT, Quality, and Ethical and Legal Issues. FINBB is actively promoting the centralized access tool Fingenious on a national level.

Take a look at the sections Minimum phenotype data, Extracting minimum phenotype data per biobank and DNA isolation protocols per biobank for more information about biobank data within FinnGen.