Swedish Biobanks

The largest Swedish biobanks are those that are collected during routine medical care.

The total number of samples in the biobanks of the Swedish Health Care system is estimated to about 50-100 million human samples, increasing with about 3-4 million samples per year.

Clinical pathology and cytology departments store about 950 000 new tissue or cellular samples each year. Another 985 000 new samples are collected each year during the cervical cytology screening. Cervical cytology samples must be stored at least 10 years according to the regulations of the Swedish Organisation for Clinical Cytology. Several departments indefinitely keep all collected samples.

Clinical Microbiology departments stores about 600 000 new serum samples each year. The Maternity Welfare serological screening of pregnant women recruits about another 70 000 samples. Serum samples collected in the Maternity Welfare program are stored for 5-10 years according to the regulations of the National Board of Health and Welfare report "Health Care during Pregnancy" (1996:7). Some departments have stored these serum samples since 1970.

Blood samples from newborns in the screening of metabolic diseases, including phenylketonuria (PKU), have been stored since 1974 and comprise about 2.7 million samples.

Biobanks participating in The National Biobank Program are listed below:

Other Swedish Biobanks whishing to present themselves contact: Joakim Dillner

Summary statistics on number of prospectively occurring cancer cases in participating biobanks: summary statistics of prospectively occurring cancer cases.