Where do medical scientists get tissue samples for their research? Say if you’re a neuroscientist studying brain tumors; where would you find enough tumors to study? Great questions. And the answer is that you’d make a withdrawal from a biobank. A biobank is a repository of tissue samples–things like blood, DNA, tumors and other biological samples. Major research institutions like universities and the National Cancer Institute have their own biobanks that collect samples from donors and make them available to researchers. One problem, though, is that individual biobanks typically don’t share their resources with everyone. For example, the National Cancer Institute has a network of biobanks. But if you’re not doing cancer research or not affiliated with the National Cancer Institute, it can be hard to access its biobank. Plus, there are no national or global standards for how biobanks store their material.