Collaboration with the biobanking community
HBM4EU is delighted to be collaborating with the European, Middle Eastern and African Society for Biobanking and Biopreservation – ESBB. Their mission is to advance the field of biobanking in support of research relating to healthcare, agriculture and the environment.
Biobanks play a key role for human biomonitoring activities, since they can provide high quality human samples with associated data. ESBB has offered to support the HBM4EU initiative by acting as a platform for knowledge sharing and exchange with the biobanking community.
As a first step of this partnership, HBM4EU partners will develop a survey that ESBB will then disseminate to its members. The survey will request materials on state of the art methods for sample preparation, storage, and exchange.
The resulting knowledge will be adapted to the needs of human biomonitoring and developed into standardized and harmonised protocols, to be shared via the online library of this website and via ESBB. The survey will also seek to establish whether biobanks can provide human samples for biomonitoring studies under HBM4EU.
Disclaimer
The HBM4EU project was launched in 2016 with the aim of improving the collective understanding of human exposure to hazardous chemicals and developing HBM as an exposure assessment method. The project had €74m in funding and jointly implemented by 120 partners from 28 participating countries – 24 EU member states plus Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Israel and the European Environment Agency. One of its aims was to ensure the sustainability of HBM in the EU beyond 2021. The project ended in June 2022. The website will not be updated any longer, except the page on peer reviewed publications, but will be online until 2032.
