UNBC hosts community info event about Northern Biobank Initiative

The $1.25 million Northern Biobank Initiative is now in its second phase.

For those unfamiliar with the term, biobanks are collections of biological material, often donated by hospital patients, used to further medical research.

“Researchers can then have access to this tissue through a very secure, confidential and ethically approved manner, to study disease further and move us along the spectrum of understanding it,” says Dr. Nadine Caron, an affiliate member of UNBC’s Northern Medical Program faculty and the project’s lead researcher.

Caron says samples are anonymized but include relevant diagnostic data, like the age and sex of the person the specimen was collected from.

The Northern Biobank is the first of its kind – most biobanks in Canada are located in urban centres in the south.

Caron says the establishment of this northern version involves a long consultation process in order to hear “the voice of northerners” and better serve the local community.

“This phase of it is starting to establish the resources in order to have a biobank up and running in the north but, more importantly, to really engage with the community, with researchers, with First Nations, to find out what people know about this, what do they think, what ideas do they have.”

The project will bolster clinical research into community-specific disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment. The plan for the Northern Biobank is to focus on research into colorectal, breast and thyroid cancers with the capability to add other complex diseases.

UNBC is the project’s lead academic institution but lead researcher Dr. Nadine Caron says there are several major players at the table.

“I think it’s really relevant that entities like Northern Health, Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA), the First Nations Health Authority, the BC Cancer Foundation and Genome BC all came to the table and said that this is something that they believed in and wanted to fund.”

An information session about the project will take place at UNBC’s Canfor Winter Garden tomorrow evening from 6 until 9pm.