Hyderabad: Dr Leroy Hood, an eminent scientist in systems biology, on Tuesday inaugurated south India’s first state-of-the-art BioBank at AIG Hospitals in Hyderabad.
The BioBank is a one of the kind storage facility dedicated to the preservation and analysis of human tissue samples for diverse research purposes, which can keep more than three lac Biosamples for more than 15 years, which will help in genomic research.
BioBank has 15 minus-80ºC freezers, five minus-20ºC freezers, and three minus-160ºC liquid nitrogen tanks with a cumulative capacity of storing more than three lakh bio samples.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr Hood, president and co-founder, Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle, said, “With an institution like AIG where research plays a significant part of their clinical approach, this biobank will add another key element that will bring collaborators from across the world to do meaningful research on different phenotypes and thereby developing cutting edge medical approaches for predictive and preventive healthcare.”
Dr Hood is one of the world’s best known biologists and inventor of the automated gene sequencer that paved the way for the Human Genome Project,
Dr D. Nageshwar Reddy, chairman of AIG Hospitals, said, “AIG BioBank represents a significant milestone in the organisation's commitment to advancing medical knowledge and fostering breakthroughs in healthcare. BioBank will serve as a vital resource for researchers, clinicians, and scientists, providing them with access to a vast repository of high-quality human tissue samples among other important biosamples.”
Dr Reddy said that BioBank will help to analyse thousands of bio samples representing a wide range of patients and healthy people data for the next five to 10 years.
Combining the data with the latest artificial intelligence systems, big data tools and machine learning algorithms, the AIG chairman said doctors will be in a position to predict chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart failure way before they start to show clinical symptoms.
