Biobanks: Archives or Resources? Their Secondary Use for Forensic Purposes—A Systematic Review

Abstract

Since the biobanks’ inception in 1980, millions of human biological samples have been stored worldwide for medical research or treatment purposes. Today the secondary use of biobanks plays an increasingly important role in research projects because it allows large-scale research starting from professional collections of biospecimens and related clinical data. It would be limiting, in the “-omics” era, to not consider the enormous potential value to law enforcement of these biospecimens, where the availability of high-performance techniques makes it possible to obtain a large amount of data, even within a single session. Therefore, the quality of the sample, in addition to the associated clinical information, becomes of crucial importance to derive scientifically valid information, including for forensic research purposes. Proposing the introduction of the concept of “solidarity”, traditionally applied only to medical and research biobanks, led to public commitment to forensic medicine. Granting the forensic researcher this possibility certainly raises some questions regarding regulatory and ethical aspects of consent, privacy, confidentiality, transparency, and participant/donor trust. Since the debate has not stopped since the origin of biobanks, this review aims to explore the state of the art relating to the use of human biological material in medical biobanks for biomedical and forensic research.