The biobank has collections of the samples of polymer, cells, tissues and organs from living life, healthy or in the state of disease, including human tissues and organs, blood, plasma, serum, body liquids, or extracted biological samples such as DNA, RNA and proteins, as well as the documents related to the samples obtained by ways of clinical record, treatment, casual survey and assented narrations. The biobank also includes the related systems for quality control, information management and application.

OECD defines biobank as “a collection of human biological material for the clinical treatment purposes and applications in biological research”.

Biobanks vary in size and purposs, including tissue bank, blood bank, cornea bank, marrow bank, banks of functional cells, genetically mutated cells, tumor cells and hybrid tumor cell lines, as well as the recently established cord stem cell bank, embryonic stem cell bank, biobank of other stem cells and the genome bank.

Biobanks are essential to facilitate the research on blood diseases, immunity system diseases, diabetes and malicious tumors.