Overweight affects 39% and obesity 13% of the world adult population, together representing 2,5 billion people affected by weight problems in the world. The prevalence of obesity has tripled over the past 40 years. To date, the therapeutic options for obesity, diabetes but more generally metabolism troubles (including NASH/ non-alcoholic steato-hepatitis, NAFLD / non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, etc.) are limited, and unfortunately the pipeline isn’t promising enough.
A French Technology Transfer Office (TTO) is acting on behalf a major university hospital and a university which created a biobank focused on metabolic disorders to provide to researchers samples as close as possible to the human disease, which means "human relevant" translational tools. Its goal is to help the development of therapeutic active ingredients and biomarkers to tackle metabolic disorders.
The collection comes from a project aiming to set up a collection of human tissues and associated data from patients presenting obesity, with or without metabolic abnormalities; its objective is the identification and validation of biomarkers associated with the onset of Diabete type 2 and its aggravation.
The biobank is composed of samples collected in morbidly obese patients with different metabolic status such as: insulin-sensitivity, insulin-resistance, and type 2 diabetes. For each patient, the biobank includes biopsies from liver, muscle, adipose tissue, and epiploic artery. Plasma, serum and extracted DNA are also available. In addition to samples, associated data were collected for each patient such as clinical and biological data, but also eating behaviour, physical activities, family history, treatments, etc.
Comorbidities of diabetes and obesity are also available in the biobank. This way, the biobank is also able to provide samples and information focusing on NASH (non-alcoholic steato-hepatitis), NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease), hepatic fibrosis, diabetic nephropathy, cardiovascular diseases, etc.
The French TTO is looking for a licensing agreement with pharmaceutical companies, diagnostic manufacturers or biomarker discovery companies involved in metabolic disorders and willing to access to the biobank samples under material transfer agreements (MTA).
