Next Chapter of the Taiwan Biobank: Sustainability and Perspectives.

The emergence of biobanks has expanded the scope of biomedical research, ushering in an era of "precision medicine" to improve the treatment of disease. However, biobanks also face sustainability challenges comprising three dimensions-"financial," "operational," and "social." The Taiwan Biobank (TWB), as a large-scale national biobank that supplies valuable phenotypic and genetic information to biomedical researchers on an application basis to investigate the relationship among personal health, genes, lifestyle, environment and diseases of the Taiwanese population, has not been sufficiently explored by researchers. Although the TWB has successfully reached a few milestones since its inception, it faces many sustainability challenges. For the next chapter of the TWB, we propose three strategies to improve sustainability. First, the Ministry of Health and Welfare launched the TWB as an infrastructure project under the leadership of Academia Sinica in 2012. We now believe that it is time that the TWB is transformed into a legal entity as a nondepartmental public body. This would not only ensure efficient, effective, and flexible operation, but would also facilitate cooperation with commercial entities. Second, we suggest that the TWB integrates with other Taiwanese biobanks to reduce cost, improve low utilization, and expand specimen collection. Third, self-financing is important if funding is ceased. Besides implementing a cost-recovery model, the commodities developed by the TWB (e.g., TWB 2.0 microarray) will help increase income. After each of these strategies has been discussed in detail, this article will conclude by highlighting how these practices can help improve biobank sustainability.

Taiwan Biobank: a project aiming to aid Taiwan's transition into a biomedical island.

Essentially, the term 'biobank' can be defined in different ways. Taking the UK Biobank's experience as the main example, the Taiwan Biobank aims to collect the DNA of a large group of people on the population base and track their health and lifestyle for at least 10 years. It is hoped that the information collected, regarding the mechanisms underlying how genes and environmental factors interact with each other to make us ill, will benefit the society in various ways, including the exploration of a new generation of treatments, support to preventive medicine discovery and also the possible benefits for the promotion of evolving public health-related industries in Taiwan. However, the involvement of large-scale population base gene data collection also triggered serious ethical, legal and social issues. In Taiwan, the challenge is even more serious than for any other biobanking experiences that have occurred previously. Among all the ethical, legal and social issues, the convergence of aboriginal people protection provided under Taiwan's Constitution imposes on the research team an obligation to create an innovative Ethical & Legal Governance Framework adaptable to the unique social background of Taiwan, including a workable public consultation/communication mechanism. In early 2005, the creation of the 'Taiwan Biobank' has been included as a part of Taiwan's strategic development in promoting the country as an island of biomedicine. In this report, the ideology, the goals and special features, government strategy, visions and, in particular, the ethical, legal and social issue planning of the Taiwan Biobank will be briefly introduced and reviewed.