#EBW25 Live: Ethics café 

The first session of Friday’s EBW scientific programme was the Ethics Ccafé, chaired by Prof. Dr. Roland Jahns, Interdisciplinary Bank of Biomaterials and Data Würzburg (ibdw), and Dr. Peggy Manders from Radboud Biobank.  

The Ethics Café is an established event of the Europe Biobank Week Congress, where the entire community  comes together in an informal setting to share their thoughts on the role that ethics frameworks play in the context of biomedical innovation.  

This interactive session facilitated an exchange   on “Consent in Paediatric Biobanking.”  

Reflecting about what emerged from the session, Dr. Manders said: 

“I think it’s a topic that needs much more attention. We need to have much more discussion regarding children, informing children, asking to participate in the biobank. I believe that we are very aware of all the stakeholders we have, but we have too little focus on the children as being also independent individuals.” 

Prof. Dr. Jahns, shared his experience leading the discussion: 

“We wanted to start a little bit focused on children biobanking. But as is usual for the Ethics Café, things turn. Then you discuss about genetics and the problems and feedback of genetic results and how we handle that with children.  

“So I always tried to come back to our main focus — children — but the discussion was so diverse, so it was really difficult. to keep the audience  together on the subject. But finally, I think we agreed in the end to make a sort of collection of how the different people’s concept of children is handled. What about contacting them? What about re-consenting them?” 

The  Ethics Café was followed by Parallel sessions VI, covering topics such as: Elevating data quality in biobanking, Samples ready for multi-omics research.