Engaging Students, Teachers and Artists to Promote New Models of Education in Biobanking. A Tale of Specimen Donation to Biobanks Based on the 3P Approach: Posters, Paints and Pictures

The use of human biological materials for research contributes greatly to the advancement of biomedical science. The sources of these materials can be from patients following diagnostic or therapeutic procedures, autopsy specimens, donations of organs or tissue from living or dead humans, body wastes (including urine, saliva, sweat) or abandoned tissue. Biological materials may also be sought from individuals for use in a specific research project. Once collected, biological materials may be held in biobanks to serve as a research resource for many years. In addition to human biological materials, information related to the specimens (namely, clinical, life style and environmental data) can be collected and stored for
research. The key word of this process is the donation of specimen and information to biobanks. The main scope of this abstract is to report a new educational approach suitable in the biobanking science consisting of the use of illustrations, paints and pictures as additional tools to describe the process of specimen donation and related data for research aims. Here we report the engagement of students of an undergraduate institute (the European Institute of Design), academic teachers and artists to describe the donation of human samples and data to research biobanks. From our perspective, illustrations and comics as well as paints and pictures are crucial to storytell the sample donation process in easily comprehensible manner. We believe that new approaches of education using alternative tools to teach the biobanking science can contribute significantly to
open the doors of this discipline to ‘‘lay people’’ involving students, teachers, scientific communicators, industries (e.g., marketing) and the general public. We also think that this approach can launch the basis for a culture of specimen donation to biobanks bridging sciences and society broadly.