INMI
National Institute for Infectious Diseases, “Lazzaro Spallanzani”
Associated Member
The Biobank of the National Institute for Infectious Diseases “L. Spallanzani” is a repository of clinical samples from infectious disease patients, viral strains and cell lines. It offers a service of sample preparation and long-term storage to researchers from the Spallanzani Institute as well as other research centres, in the framework of established collaborations with the following objectives: conducting research projects and observational studies, mandatory storing of diagnostic samples, diagnostic residual samples, baseline sera of health-care workers engaged in special activities, and cell and virus strain libraries. It currently hosts a very large collection of biological materials (>1,000,000 samples belonging to specific projects and collections, as well as valuable biological materials, and viral strains), and aims to be an important support for epidemiological, basic and clinical biomedical research. Possible outcomes of such research could be: discovery of new infectious agents or etiological links between known pathogens and human diseases, new insight into the pathogenesis of acute and chronic infectious diseases, as well as validating new diagnostic methods or discovering new biomarkers related to the evolution of diseases and evaluating the appearance of resistance to antiviral or antimicrobial therapy. INMI provides strain isolation, identification, characterization, purification and many analyses ranging from genetic/metabolic microorganism profiling to bioinformatics consultancy.
Key people:
- Carla Fontana
- Stefania Carrara
