Jan Smit: The hot connection
‘In 1992 I started my first biobank. It contained blood serum and plasma of three thousand elderly people, a great number in those days. It was biobanking avant la lettre, not many regulations were in place at that time.’
Jan Smit is a methodologist specialised in cohort studies at the VUMC. As a biobanking pioneer, he can look back and evaluate his field of work. His 1992 biobank is still in use, but in the meantime a lot has changed in the world of biobanking, especially since the beginning of the new millennium.
According to Smit, biobanking is ‘hot’. Governments and scientific institutions spend large amounts of money both to assemble collections and to use biological materials of patients and population groups. These materials, with DNA as the most important newcomer, contain valuable information, useful for all kinds of research purposes. They can provide an insight into disease mechanisms, and combined with the outcomes of questionnaires they can uncover relationships between physiology and behaviour. According to Smit, the next step will be genetic pharmacology: personalised medicine. In research aimed at this goal, biobanks fill the gap between patient information and fundamental knowledge of medicine.
‘Translational research is the future. It connects fundamental and clinical knowledge. At the Neuroscience Campus we are aware of this connection too. We have groups working on each different step in translational research.’
To make these connections, biobanks should be as highly accessible as possible. Smit is currently working on a large project to harmonise the different biobanks that have been created at the VUMC. ‘It is very important that these biobanks are compatible, so that they can exchange material. Therefore, the samples should be collected and conserved in the same way, labelled in the same way and stored in the same way.’ A tough job, according to Smit, since the differences between biobanks are large. Initially, every group had its own rules and procedures for storing and administrating data. Luckily, regarding these issues the Neuroscience biobanks are among the best documented in the VUMC Amsterdam, Smit says.
Thirty thousand test persons
‘Reputations of research groups are very important in the world of biobanking. Nowadays, it is impossible to do significant scientific research without cooperating with other groups. Three thousand people in one study is not a great number anymore. For some research questions, you need at least thirty thousand test persons to have some statistical power.’
Recently, Smit and VU colleagues of the Netherlands Study on Depression and Anxiety and Netherlands Twin Register studies jointly published a paper in Molecular Psychiatry, in which they identify a potential new gene related with depression, called Piccolo. ‘Other Neuroscience Campus groups now continue to work on this subject, for example by making mouse models for the study of the Piccolo gene. With their success, our fame will grow.’
