Simon
Senior Member
- Messages
- 3,789
- Location
- Monmouth, UK
The UK ME/CFS biobank paves the way for bigger and better research | #MEAction
a new blog
On ME Awareness day this year, 12th May, the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine (LSTHM) opened the UK ME/CFS Biobank for business, with blood samples available from 300 patients now, and there will soon be samples for over 200 controls. The ready availability of samples for large numbers of well-characterised patients and controls has the potential to make research faster, easier and better.
....
Getting patients and samples can be the biggest hurdle in biomedical research
Often the hardest, most expensive, slowest – and yet perhaps the most important – part of a research study is assembling samples from a group of well-diagnosed patients. The Biobank can jump-start the research process by providing ‘off the shelf’ patient samples that can be shipped anywhere in the world. Almost all the Biobank patients meet Canadian consensus criteria, and researchers can pick and choose samples according to criteria. Not only is this much faster and more convenient for researchers, it allows them access to large numbers of patients, which is critical in a field that has been plagued by small sample sizes and unreliable results.
....
Enough blood to launch a wave of large studies
Blood is processed into different sample types, such as plasma and white blood cells.
The Biobank is big enough to potentially power a wave of new, large studies that would significantly change the research landscape. Size matters in research studies and bigger is better (for rather tedious statistical reasons). Big studies can detect smaller, but important, differences small studies would miss, as well as having the power to find subgroups – something incredibly important in ME research. Also, findings from small studies are also more likely to be false positives, and where they do find a real effect, it’s likely to be smaller than the study finds.
To put the Biobank’s potential to enable bigger studies into perspective, the largest biomedical study in recent times is Dr Mady Hornig and Dr Ian Lipkin‘s cytokine signature study last year, with almost 300 patients. There are 300 patients in the UK ME/CFS Biobank, with 40 samples for each patient (and control) so it could power many studies this size. The Lipkin/Hornig study needed two samples for each person in the study and if that’s typical then the 40 samples for each Biobank subject could power twenty such studies, each with 300 patients. Or it could power 60 studies with 100 patients each, still large by current standards.
Read the full blog at #MEAction
a new blog
On ME Awareness day this year, 12th May, the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine (LSTHM) opened the UK ME/CFS Biobank for business, with blood samples available from 300 patients now, and there will soon be samples for over 200 controls. The ready availability of samples for large numbers of well-characterised patients and controls has the potential to make research faster, easier and better.
....
Getting patients and samples can be the biggest hurdle in biomedical research
Often the hardest, most expensive, slowest – and yet perhaps the most important – part of a research study is assembling samples from a group of well-diagnosed patients. The Biobank can jump-start the research process by providing ‘off the shelf’ patient samples that can be shipped anywhere in the world. Almost all the Biobank patients meet Canadian consensus criteria, and researchers can pick and choose samples according to criteria. Not only is this much faster and more convenient for researchers, it allows them access to large numbers of patients, which is critical in a field that has been plagued by small sample sizes and unreliable results.
....
Enough blood to launch a wave of large studies
Blood is processed into different sample types, such as plasma and white blood cells.
The Biobank is big enough to potentially power a wave of new, large studies that would significantly change the research landscape. Size matters in research studies and bigger is better (for rather tedious statistical reasons). Big studies can detect smaller, but important, differences small studies would miss, as well as having the power to find subgroups – something incredibly important in ME research. Also, findings from small studies are also more likely to be false positives, and where they do find a real effect, it’s likely to be smaller than the study finds.
To put the Biobank’s potential to enable bigger studies into perspective, the largest biomedical study in recent times is Dr Mady Hornig and Dr Ian Lipkin‘s cytokine signature study last year, with almost 300 patients. There are 300 patients in the UK ME/CFS Biobank, with 40 samples for each patient (and control) so it could power many studies this size. The Lipkin/Hornig study needed two samples for each person in the study and if that’s typical then the 40 samples for each Biobank subject could power twenty such studies, each with 300 patients. Or it could power 60 studies with 100 patients each, still large by current standards.
Read the full blog at #MEAction