title: National Biobank of Korea: Quality control Programs of Collected-human Biospecimens.
abstract: Personalized medicine is emerging as a main paradigm for risk prediction, pre-diagnosis, and effective prevention and treatment of disease. A large number of human biospecimens and their clinical data are essential resources for the success of personalized medicine as well as other biomedical research. The National Biobank of Korea (NBK) has collected well-annotated and high quality human biospecimens, and distributes them to the Korean biomedical scientists, through the Korea Biobank Project (KBP). The ultimate goal of NBK activities is to promote biomedical research and public health. As of December- 2011, the NBK has collected various human biospecimens from 525,416 participants including 325,952 Korean populations and 199,464 patients. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the KBP and quality control programs for collection of human biospecimens with high quality of NBK.
authors.affiliation: Division of Biobank for Health Sciences, Korea National Institute of Health, Osong, Korea.
authors.forename: Jae-Eun
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Ji-Hyun
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Eun-Jung
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Hong
authors.forename: Hye Sook
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Yoo
authors.forename: Hye-Young
authors.initials: HY
authors.lastname: Nam
authors.forename: Ok
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Park
keywords: Korea Biobank Project; National Biobank of Korea; biobank; human biospecimens; quality control