The Australian Arthritis and Autoimmune Biobank Collaborative A3BC is a national network of state-of-the-art biobanking, longitudinal data collection/linkage, big-data analytics and decision support for enabling and translating innovative research discovery. The A3BC presents a comprehensive approach to evidence-based medicine by integrating broad multi-omic, patient-reported (partnered with the Australian Rheumatology Association Database – ARAD), medical and administrative health data from people with musculoskeletal disease.
The A3BC is initially focused on Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA), Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA), Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) and Vasculitis, but will expand in time to include other musculoskeletal and autoimmune conditions and facilitate broader translational research.
The A3BC aims to:
- Establish a national, open-access (ethics-approved), best-practice biobank network (eight nodes) to collect, process and store a diverse range of high-quality biospecimens;
- Integrate biospecimen-derived multi-omic data (genomic, microbiomic etc) with patient-reported outcome/experience data (treatment, quality of life, diet etc) and broader data including electronic medical records, Commonwealth data (i.e. MBS) and cancer/death registries;
- Apply cutting-edge visualisation, big-data analytics and machine-learning tools to interrogate this integrated data for potential associations/trends of patient and population significance; and
- Enable the translation of discovery into a comprehensive evidence base for improved musculoskeletal policy/practice across precision and preventive medicine.
… to give the right care, to the right patient, at the right time!
The A3BC represents a new holistic model of multi-omic and clinical/health data integration and analysis to best support research discovery and clinical decision-making.
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