Finnish Biobanks – FINBB and Novartis, a global pharmaceutical company, have signed a master service agreement and jointly agreed to collaborate to advance medical research in Finland.
"Novartis is committed to long-term partnerships to improve patient care and quality of life as well as the well-being of people living in Finland. We strongly believe that the collaboration between FINBB and Novartis will help to achieve these goals”, says Jaana Santaholma, Country Medical Director of Novartis Finland.
FINBB provides the digital one-stop shop - Fingenious® service that enables the access to millions of patient samples as well as to their associated clinical and biodata in accordance with the Finnish Biobank Act.
“Public-private partnership with R&D focused innovative pharmaceutical company like Novartis has potential to develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases in the future. We are very excited about our meaningful collaboration for patients suffering from different kinds of diseases”, says Marco Hautalahti, CEO of FINBB.
Novartis has previously successfully collaborated with several biobanks in Finland and warmly welcomes this new opportunity to exploit opportunities provided by FINBB, harmonizing and providing simplified processes to utilize biobank samples and data.
The collaboration includes the collections of biobank samples, biodata, and study participant recruitment from all public biobanks in Finland: Arctic Biobank, Auria Biobank, Biobank Borealis, Biobank of Central Finland, Biobank of Eastern Finland, Finnish Clinical Biobank Tampere, Helsinki Biobank and Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) Biobank. All services will be delivered by the digital Fingenious® service - 1st in class in Europe.