Biosample centre opened ‘to help find new treatments’

Today (January 28th), the £24 million National Institute for Health Research National Biosample Centre and has opened its doors for the first time.

According to the Department for Health (DH), the centre is for biomedical and clinical research and aims to soon find treatments for conditions like dementia and diabetes.

The facilities, based in Milton Keynes, will increase the UK's capacity for these types of studies and will be available for academic and NHS health researchers, as well as those from broader life science industries.

It will be subject to strict research governance and ethical frameworks, which oversee issues like appropriate consent and confidentiality.

The centre will help researchers and organisations overcome the challenges they face when attempting to establish, run and maintain studies involving large volumes of biological samples.

It will be the largest facility of its kind in the UK and will create more than 50 jobs, while having the capacity to store 20 million samples at temperatures as low as -196 degrees celsius.

Dr Tim Peakman, chief executive of UK Biocentre, which will run the facility, commented: "It will improve the quality of resources available for research, speed up generation of research findings, and reduce costs, which will free up money to be spent on further studies."