Abstract
The development of biobanks in Taiwan has been progressed in recent decade. But biobnaking in Taiwan raised complex ethical, legal and social implications (ELSIs) because of its island and immigrant culture. To deal with the complex issues, Taiwan’s government enacted The Human Biobank Management Act to regulate biobanking activities in 2010. However the single-act-regulated governance structure is now insufficient to cope with issues emerging from the integration of domestic biobanks in Taiwan, and also to future international research cooperation. In recent years, international research community has developed several cross-border biobanking consortiums. This article reviewed the governance structures of two of the most sophisticated consortiums among them, P3G and BBMRI-ERIC. Through our review, we found the differences of governance strategies of the two consortiums. P3G takes a bottom-up governance strategy involving ethical self-regulation in its individual and NGOs members from international research community. On the other hand, BBMRI-ERIC takes a top-down governance strategy involving a central node to integrate national biobank infrastructures implemented in its member states. Through comparative studies on the international biobanking consortiums and current situation in Taiwan, we identified major barriers including ethical, logistical and legal issues in international and internal cooperation and collaboration of biobanks in Taiwan. In conclusion, we provided a proposed solution including legal and ethical strategies to Taiwan government and its national biobank(Taiwan Biobank) in order to overcome these barriers through the lessons from P3G and BBMRI.