VetBiobank, Vetmeduni Vienna: A bioresource for clinical animal biospecimens

The VetBiobank was established in 2007 as part of the VetCore Facility for Research at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. The primary objectives of the VetBiobank are (1) to achieve comprehensive collections of high quality animal samples to support research projects and (2) to provide biological reference material as controls e.g. for method verification. Currently, collections mainly contain tumor tissues and healthy reference tissues from cats and dogs, but also a small number of biospecimens from other diseases and other species, including macaque, horse, pig, and small companion animals. A total number of around 58000 individual samples are stored. The VetBiobank is partner of BBMRI.at (the Biobanking and BioMolecular resource Research Infrastructure Austria [1]), the Austrian national node of the European research infrastructure BBMRI-ERIC [2], comprising the only member with a focus on veterinary medicine. Keywords: clinical animal samples, high quality samples and data, tumor and normal tissue collections, project specific collections, samples from animal experiments