About NCGG biobank

NCGG Biobank was established in 2012 at the National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology, Aichi, Japan. The Biobank collects and stores samples and information with the informed consent of donors according to relevant laws and guidelines, mainly from elderly patients with dementia or other geriatric disorders in the hospital, and distributes them widely for medical research including academia and industries after approval of the Utilization Review Board.

As of May 2024, the biobank has enrolled approximately 14,000 patients from hospitals and holds around 50,000 patient-derived samples, primarily serum and plasma, along with medical information and genomic data. In addition to blood samples, the Biobank also collects and stores cerebrospinal fluid, urine, and tissue specimens from surgeries such as spinal ligamentum flava, skin, and brain tumors in some cases. Moreover, the Biobank has more than 20,000 research participants enrolled from other cooperative cohort studies, and their blood samples are also stored. The Biobank has distributed more than 100,000 samples and 160,000 data in total to users with over 100 projects.

NCGG biobank implements a quality management system for the operation of biobanking and has become among the first accredited Japanese biobanks to ISO 20387:2018 in March 2024.

NCGG biobank is a member of the National Center Biobank Network (NCBN), a biobank project operated by six National Centers for Biomedical Research and Innovation (NCs) in a networked and federated organizational form while respecting their individual disease specialties toward the "new medical care". NCBN operates a database named NCBN Catalog Database, allowing to centrally search for biospecimens collected at the biobanks of the six national centers that comprise the NCBN by disease name, gender, sample type, age group, medical interview information, and the presence or absence of genomic information. The Biobank also joins Biobank Network Japan, a network of 14 biobanks in Japan (as of April 2024) based on the Biobank-Construction and Utilization biobank for genomic medicine Realization (Genome Research Biobank), a project of the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED).

NCGG Biobank is also an institutional member of International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER).