Biobanks Explained: The Infrastructure Behind Better Healthcare
In 2022, over 80% of genomic studies worldwide were based on data from Western populations. India — home to one-sixth of humanity — contributed less than 2%. This gap has real consequences: treatments, diagnostics, and drug responses developed elsewhere often don’t account for Indian genetic and environmental diversity.
This is where biobanks can change the story.
Biobanks are long-horizon research engines that determine whether a country participates in the future of precision healthcare or gets left behind. As India invests in next-generation health science, understanding what biobanks do — and why they matter — becomes essential.
What Is a Biobank? Understanding Medical Research’s Essential Infrastructure
A Biobank is a specialized facility that collects, processes, stores, and manages human biospecimens along with their associated clinical information. These biospecimens such as blood, serum, plasma, tissue samples, DNA, RNA, and microbial isolates along with associated health data for medical research.
Unlike hospital laboratories that analyze samples for immediate diagnosis, biobanks preserve specimens for long-term research that can span decades. These collections become invaluable resources for scientists developing personalized treatments, understanding disease patterns, and creating diagnostic tools tailored to diverse populations.
What do Biobanks store?
Modern biobanks maintain diverse collections of human biospecimens including blood samples (serum and plasma), DNA and RNA for genetic analysis, tissue samples from biopsies, cell lines for laboratory research, and microbial isolates for infectious disease studies.
The Sri Sathya Sai Biobank and Research Hub (SSSBRH), affiliated with SSSIHL, exemplifies this comprehensive approach. With over 25,000 existing samples including 10,000 antimicrobial resistance bacterial isolates, 5,000 cardiovascular disease specimens, and 5,000 infectious disease samples, it demonstrates how biobanks create research-ready collections addressing India’s specific health challenges.
How Biobanks Work
Biobanking follows a rigorous three-stage process. First, clinical samples are collected from consenting individuals through established ethical protocols at healthcare facilities. These samples undergo standardized processing in advanced laboratories like SSSBRH’s BSL-1 and BSL-2 facilities within their 50,000 sq ft Central Research Instruments Facility.
Next comes preservation using sophisticated cryogenic systems that maintain samples at ultra-low temperatures (-80°C, -150°C, and -180°C) with full redundancy to ensure long-term viability. SSSBRH employs on-site liquid nitrogen generation producing 20 liters daily, which will be expanded to 30 liters daily in coming years , ensuring continuous operations without external dependencies.
Finally, biobanks distribute samples to qualified researchers globally, accelerating medical discoveries that would be impossible for individual institutions to conduct alone. This collaborative model transforms isolated healthcare data into powerful research tools.
India’s long-standing absence in global health datasets is not a statistic we must accept.
As India’s population remains dramatically underrepresented in global precision medicine datasets, facilities like the Sri Sathya Sai Biobank and Research Hub don’t just preserve biological samples, they preserve the possibility that future treatments will work equally well for Indian patients as they do for populations historically studied in Western research.
In that sense, a biobank is a long-term commitment to scientific equity. And for a country as diverse as ours, it may become one of the most important assets shaping the next generation of healthcare.
Other prominent biobanks:
National Cancer Tissue Biobank (IIT Madras), National Liver Disease Biobank (ILBS Delhi), National Centre for Cell Science Biobank (Pune), CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology Biobank (Chandigarh), NIMHANS Brain Bank (Bengaluru), JALMA Biobank (Agra), TiMBR Biorepository (Tata Medical Centre Kolkata), Sapien BioSciences Biobank (Hyderabad), THSTI Biorepository (Faridabad), ADBAS Biobank (Bengaluru)