Professor Kurt Zatloukal, you’ve been talking about the International Network of Bio-banks and Expert Centres. What is it about bio-banks that is so crucial to your preclinical work in cancer to try and find out what’s happening at the very micro-levels?

So we have to think about that basically all our knowledge on diseases, particularly cancer, and at the end all our current diagnostic and therapeutic options, are based on very systematic investigation of human biological samples, tumours that have been removed by therapy or lining up alterations we find in these tumours with medical data, with disease outcomes, with other things. So far this research basically was done based on collections set up in the context of research groups to facilitate their research.

Individual research groups?

Individual research. So it was a very individual scientist driven process. The problem is that this does not work anymore. One reason is because this research has to occur in an increasingly complex regulated ethical and legal framework so individual scientists cannot cope with all these issues, protection, everything, so it requires a professional infrastructure. This professional infrastructure or framework is provided by bio-bank. So it’s nothing really new, it’s just a more professional framework to enable quality defined, quality controlled medical research.

So there becomes a bio-bank but it needs to be international and it needs to be systematic, how do you do that?

You were mentioning international, why is international important? Because if we think about cancer the problems are not local ones, these are international, global ones and it would make no sense if the problems are addressed in an uncoordinated manner by small groups.

And you need to get all the groups to do things in the same way.

Yes, and also we have to be able that we can learn from each other, we can pool data. There is a lot of duplication because of non-coordinated research because we are not really able to compare data produced by different groups. This becomes, more importantly, the more specific analytical technologies we are employing, they more specifically look into diseases, the more important it is that the quality of the data is really comparable.

Now, at the Medical University of Graz, what have you been doing to make this easier to actually happen, to come about?

Actually our university has a very large collection of biological samples, basically as a by-product of healthcare - tumour surgery, medical diagnostics. We tried to improve how these resources can facilitate research and then we became part of a European research infrastructure process. The aim of this process was to develop a concept that basically unifies, so provides a common framework, for accessing these biological samples to support medical research.

And how do you do that? Because it needs the co-operation of bench scientists with clinicians and infrastructure to make it all possible, doesn’t it?

Right, it requires this interdisciplinary collaboration but also it requires the agreement on common procedures and common standards. Maybe the biggest challenge was to make people collaborate.

And how far have you got internationally?

Actually the planning of building such an infrastructure, such a framework for all of Europe, was funded through the European Framework programmes. The planning was completed in February last year and now it’s basically on the member state side to implement this. The application is currently submitted to the European Commission to get this infrastructure special legal entity granted and then hopefully somewhere at the beginning of next year member states will operate this infrastructure.

That sounds wonderful, what is this going to do? What, in fact, is the role of biobanks and how can they be implemented? What sort of harvest of new discoveries about cancer do you think will come from this?

One of the biggest challenges currently we are facing is how we can better understand why different cancer types respond differently to the same treatment, why outcomes are so different. This is particularly important in the context of the specific drugs we now have available that directly interfere with a very specific mechanism in the cell. This means we have to understand who is the right patient for this very specific drug. Therefore we need very large scale comparative studies so we get an overview on the diversity of diseases and we need the appropriate diagnostic tools to select the right patients for this therapy. This requires multinational collaborative effort. But there is another challenge, namely what we learn from these drugs that are already part of our healthcare is they work only in very small patient groups and they’re very expensive. There are big concerns whether these can be financed in the future and whether this can really be the future of healthcare, treatment of cancer. I think there is a great chance that these types of specific therapies might really become an important element of healthcare is that we find ways to select the patients not based on the organ that has a tumour developed but on the mechanism that caused the cancer.

Right, now you’re saying that although there is a big need to individualise therapy this may take you away from focussing on one particular organ, is that it?

Right, because what we learned is that several cancers that develop in different organs have the same mechanism that was driving the development of the cancer and this same mechanism is the target of the drug. So the chance that we may expect is that in the future we can redefine disease groups not based on the affected organ but on the basis of the affected mechanism that matches with the activity of the drug.

So do you believe that cancer science will come together and you’ll find a few unifying mechanisms that could help you understand cancer?

I hope so; that at least if we don’t succeed I’m very afraid that we simply cannot afford it. It will be a key development in making these new therapies and new approaches to be financed through healthcare systems.

So the bio-banks, how much would you say they could really help? What’s the incentive you would give to governments and scientists and doctors all over the world to really put a lot of work into their bio-banks to make sure that they happen? What’s the pay-off going to be that you could tell them about?

The first pay-off is it’s the basis for basically all advancement in medical research, or not all, most of the advancement, particularly in the context of personalised medicine. And there are major investments made into this type of research but in a non-coordinated manner. There is a lot of duplication so the first pay-off is if we better co-ordinate our work we save a lot of money because we do not waste resources in unnecessary duplication. That’s the immediate – saving and pay-off. The next thing is the big challenges we are facing here are not challenges of Europe, the US or somewhere, they are the same elsewhere. It would make no sense that we duplicate efforts, do not co-ordinate activities, we should develop joint forces. In order to facilitate this we need to have a framework that allows these joint forces and collaborative research. We need to agree on common standards, common principles, common data formats and so on and so on.

Simplify it for me then, finally. The call for action would be to do what in one or two simple words?

Basically it should enable multinational collaborative research, very similar that, for instance, other science disciplines have experienced decades ago. Think about the big achievements in physics or astronomy could never have been achieved in this very small group research arena as we are doing medical research. These are big collaborative consortia building the large telescopes, building the colliders and other things and I think we have to learn from these other fields that collaborative efforts are needed to addressing the big challenges.

Kurt, thank you for joining us on ecancer television.

OK, thank you very much.