Presentation

The Biothèque Hospitalo-Universitaire de Liège (BHUL) is a biobank in the sense of the law of December 19, 2008 relating to the obtaining and use of human body material intended for human medical applications or for scientific research purposes: it is a "structure that ensures the storage and provision of human body material (HBM), exclusively for scientific research and which is not intended for any human application".

In other words, it is a collection of human body material comprising cells, human tissues and biological fluids (serum, blood, plasma, puncture fluids, etc.) and associated derivatives (RNA, DNA, proteins, etc.). These collections are established on the basis of residual material from samples taken as part of an exploration or clinical follow-up, or on the basis of prospective collection from patients meeting certain selection criteria. Human body material is sampled and preserved according to standardized procedures, making it available to researchers in fundamental, translational, clinical and applied (industrial) research.

The BHUL is the institutional biobank of the CHU de Liège, resulting from the merger of 6 biobanks active in various hospital departments, namely pathological anatomy, clinical hematology, pneumology, gastroenterology, cardiology and genetics.

Facilities

The BHUL currently has activity premises spread across various hospital and GIGA buildings. In spring 2018, its activities will be transferred to the CIO-Unilab building with a new sample processing laboratory and centralized storage facility.

Ethical and legal aspects

The collection of samples and the provision of material to researchers, whether for fundamental, translational or clinical research, comply with the rules imposed by current legislation and the recommendations of the Comité d'Ethique Hospitalo-Facultaire Universitaire de Liège.

The BHUL's operations have also been approved by the Comité d'Ethique Hospitalo-Facultaire Universitaire de Liège.

Managers

Chairman of the BHUL Management Committee: Prof. P. DELVENNE

Scientific Director of the BHUL: Mme S. GOFFLOT

Collections

The BHUL manages collections of tissue and blood samples from patients and healthy individuals. Stored material is accompanied by clinical annotations and catalogued in a standardized database.