Letter to the editor in response to the article “To assess the attitudes of Irish patients attending a pigmented lesion clinic and healthcare staff employed in an academic hospital to biobanking, a quantitative study”

Abstract

We read with great interest the recent article by Bowe et al. on the attitudes of Irish patients to biobanking. It is heartening to learn that the majority of patients, healthcare workers and members of the public in Ireland are willing to donate biospecimens for medical research purposes.¹ Biobanks are vital to the progression of medical research, and can be defined as structured collections of biological samples and associated data stored for the purposes of present and future research.² One of the most recognised is the UK Biobank, a database containing genetic, lifestyle and health information from half a million UK participants. Recent UK Biobank data shows malignant melanoma is the fourth most common prevalent malignant cancer and the second most common incident malignant cancer in the 40–49 years age group.³

This willingness of patients to participate in biobanking is not always reflected in the literature. In a literature search conducted on PubMed using the terms ‘biobank’ or ‘biobanking,’ ‘attitudes’ and ‘public’; 337 abstracts were identified. These were reviewed for suitability by the authors and 62 deemed appropriate for inclusion as they contained content specific to public attitudes towards biobanking. Overall, the literature reveals a lack of knowledge of biobanking amongst the general public but a generally positive public opinion on the subject.⁴ A further literature search was conducted with a melanoma-specific focus on PubMed using the terms ‘biobank’ or ‘biobanking,’ ‘melanoma’ and ‘public.’ This search identified 55 abstracts, which were reviewed for suitability by the authors. There were no papers identified with content specific to public attitudes towards biobanking in melanoma, while there were 32 papers which analysed UK Biobank data for cancer research including in melanoma. We also looked at social media. Targeted searches were performed on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X using the terms or hashtags ‘biobank’ and ‘biobanking’. The top 10 results on each site were analysed to identify content creator demographics, number of views and/or followers of the page, the type of content and associated hashtags or themes, as outlined in Table 1. On TikTok, the most common demographic of content creator was healthcare professionals, while on the other platforms the most common demographic was research organisations. The reach on TikTok was found to be greater than other platforms, with a mean of 20,100 views per post (range 300–96,000) and an average follower count of 4816. This compares to a mean follower count of 3497 on Instagram, 4340 on Facebook and 4688 on Twitter/X. The type of content across all platforms was predominantly educational, followed by advertising. The most common themes across all platforms were genomics and cancer research. Across all platforms, none of the top posts mentioned biobanking in the context of melanoma. A social media analysis tool, Prowly, was also utilised. This found that in the past month; ‘biobank’ was mentioned most commonly on Twitter/X which accounted for 44.44% of social media mentions. It reported that 66.67% of biobank post sentiment was positive, 29.63% neutral and 3.7% negative, as seen in Figure 1. The post with top engagement was an educational Facebook video from a medical research institute in Australia, which engaged 42 individuals.⁵ These searches were carried out in August 2024.

The positive attitudes reported by Bowe et al. should be amplified in the literature and on social media.

Claudine Howard-James is the corresponding author for this study, responsible for literature review, data collection and analysis, drafting and finalising the manuscript and creating the figures included in the manuscript. Claire Quigley assisted with conception and creation of the study. Caoimhe Dalton assisted with the manuscript. Anne-Marie Tobin is the consultant responsible for oversight and final approval of the manuscript.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Not applicable.