ICMR sets up India’s first diabetes biobank in Chennai

The country’s first diabetes biobank, a repository of population-based biological samples aimed at supporting scientific research, has been established in Chennai by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in collaboration with the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation (MDRF). The biobank set up at the MDRF, Chennai aims to gather, process, store and distribute biospecimens to assist scientific studies with the permission of the ICMR.
The biobank will facilitate advanced research on the causes of diabetes, the variations of the Indian type of diabetes and related disorders, said Dr V Mohan, chairman of the MDRF and Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Specialities Centre.
The biobank has blood samples from two ICMR-funded studies — the ICMR- India Diabetes (ICMR- INDIAB) study conducted in all states and Union territories in phases from 2008 to 2020 and the “Registry of people with diabetes in India at a young age at the onset”, which was launched in 2006 and is still ongoing.
A plethora of blood samples of different types of diabetes in the young, such as Type 1, Type 2 and gestational diabetes, have been stored for future studies and research, Mohan said.
The process of setting up the biobank started around two years ago.
Source: Economictimes