Ten Years of Experience in Training Biobank Managers at Master’s Level in France

The growing complexity of biobanking requires dedicated professional staff who are literate with the multiple aspects of the biobanking process, including technical, managerial, regulatory, and ethical aspects, and who have a good understanding of the challenges of biospecimen research. Here we describe the structure and achievements of a systematic 2-year training program at the Master’s level intended for students with a background in life sciences and providing them with a professional qualification as a “Biobank Manager”. This course was initiated in 2010 as a program of the Catholic University of Lyon (France). The multidisciplinary training program includes courses on biobank design and infrastructure, on pre- and post-analytical biospecimen processing, on protocol development, on ethical and regulatory aspects as well as a primer to epidemiology, high-throughput molecular biology, and translational research. In parallel, students also receive generic training in management, budget planning, data analysis, and statistics, as well as 11 months of hands-on internship training in biobanks handling human, animal, plant, or microbial biospecimens. A total of 81 students have graduated since 2012, all of whom found a job within 6 months of graduation.