The Living Airway Biobank (LAB) 2024 renewal

• Research type

  Research Tissue Bank

• IRAS ID

  343110

• Research summary

  The Living Airway Biobank (LAB)

• REC name

  North West - Liverpool Central Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  24/NW/0168

• Date of REC Opinion

  12 Jun 2024

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion

• Data collection arrangements

  This project will collect and store airway tissues and secretions from both adults and children with a wide range of respiratory diseases for use by researchers throughout the UK. These samples will include airway brushings from healthy donors and from patients with a wide variety of respiratory conditions including asthma, COPD, cystic fibrosis and from children and adults with rare diseases. Patients will be recruited and consent obtained from members of the clinical teams from Great Ormond Street Children’s hospital, the Royal Free Hospital, London and the National Nose, Throat and Ear Hospital. Samples of lung tissue that are not needed for diagnosis or transplantation will also be collected during lung transplantation at the Papworth Lung Transplantation Centre and consent obtained from organ donor coordinators.

  All samples will be immediately couriered to UCL Institute of Child Health, where they will be entered into a secure database and frozen or grown to form a ‘living’ biobank. A duplicate of every frozen sample will be stored at the UCL Royal Free Hospital Biobank providing essential back up. The samples collected will have the details of the patient’s respiratory problems and will form a unique research resource for studies into the mechanisms responsible for respiratory diseases and for the development of novel treatment strategies.

• Research programme

  Respiratory disease kills 1 in 4 people in the UK, is the most common long-term childhood illness, costs the NHS more than any other disease area. Research into respiratory diseases would be greatly helped by access to tissue from patients with various respiratory conditions and from healthy individuals. This tissue is currently very difficult for research groups to access. The Living Airway Biobank will collect respiratory tissue from adults and children with a wide variety of respiratory diseases such as cystic fibrosis, pulmonary fibrosis, COPD, asthma, rhinitis, primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) and other diseases that may affect the respiratory tract. This will allow research into the mechanisms of respiratory disease and help in the development of therapeutic interventions. Multiple research groups in the UK will benefit especially those working in basic science, on infection, on development of new drugs and on our understanding of rare respiratory diseases. A huge benefit will be our ability to provide living cells that we can grow so they very closely resemble the lining of the airways and nasal passages we breath through. This has proved a very difficult technique for research groups to master and provision of these cells will accelerate respiratory research. Uniquely we will be able to provide a detailed clinical history and characterisation of the cells taken from patients to research groups. This information will prove invaluable to researchers striving to understand and treat respiratory disease.

• Storage license

  12220

• RTBTitle

  The Living Airway Biobank (LAB)

• Establishment organisation

  University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health,

• Establishment organisation address

  30 Guilford Street

  London

  WC1N 1EH