The ICVS/3Bs mission is to promote better healthcare by fostering knowledge advancement in mechanisms of disease and advanced therapies. It also aims at promoting and generating value through the development of innovative products. Moreover, the ICVS/3Bs has a strong link with Braga Hospital, Clinical Academic Centre (2CA) and other healthcare partners. This collaboration is thus extremely relevant and of interest for all institutions. From this high privileged environment, we feel the need of having, in the Minho region, a powerful instrument for the implementation of precision medicine that will not happen without tools to translate novel information into health care. For that mission the establishment and consolidation of the Minho BioMedicine Biobank (MinhoMedBiobank) Initiative is crucial.

The MinhoMedBiobank has the mission of improve healthcare through the development of diagnostics and therapies for key areas of the ICVS/3Bs. The mission of MinhoMedBiobank is to mobilize the strengths of the 3 partner institutions to build a sustainable national system to coordinate, support and promote translational and clinical research. MinhoMedBiobank has identified the importance of a national strategic approach to standardized biobanking as a key pillar for clinical and translational research in Portugal. MinhoMedBiobank vision is the creation of a standardized and carefully characterized repository of biological specimens and associated clinical data, accessible to academic and industry researchers and to companies to strengthen biomedical research.

The use of standardized protocols for sample collection, processing and storage will help to provide the proper safeguards and assurances required for sample quality, consistency and integrity among bio-collections at different sites. For that reason, our biobank is compliant with some basic standard procedures.