The use of samples and data in biobank research

Finnish biobank collections are highly valuable and internationally unique research material

Finland's strengths include the population's positive attitude towards medical research, a uniform health care system, and several high-quality registers that enable researches to follow the health of their study subjects throughout their lives. Researchers can, for example, examine tissue samples as well as interviews and measurements acquired 20 years earlier and try to find out factors that have contributed to disease onset at a later date. If some rare type of cancer would suddenly become more common, researchers could go back to samples collected 10–20 years earlier to find out, for example, whether a viral disease prevalent at that period could have increased the risk of the disease.

Results from THL's population studies have been published in high impact scientific journals and are available for researchers and health care operators across the world.