Clinical samples, such as tissue and blood, are collected from patients during procedures for diagnosis and treatment.
The portions of these biospecimens that are not used for diagnosis (and their associated clinical data), can be stored in biobanks for many years – they are invaluable sources of material for biomedical research. As childhood cancers are rare, the numbers of biospecimens collected and stored by individual biobanks are limited to the number of patients associated with that biobank. A biobanking network however, allows the use of large cohorts of biospecimens that are collected and stored.