British cancer researchers welcome plans to pool the UK's small cancer databases into a virtual tumor bank, even as the Medical Research Council (MRC), which will fund part of the project, is smarting from criticism about the UK Biobank database.

The tumor bank, launched by the National Cancer Research Institute, will receive £1 million for each of five years from three primary sources: the Department of Health, the charity Cancer Research UK and the MRC. The tumor bank will complement UK Biobank, a genetic database to help study gene-environment interaction in common diseases.

George Radda, chief executive of the MRC, says both databases will be valuable. “The new approach, using computational biology to handle vast amounts of data...is terribly important,” he says. “It is really going to be the way of solving some of the major health problems.”

A report from the House of Commons' Science and Technology Select Committee, published 25 March, slammed the MRC's allocation of funds and raised ethical concerns about Biobank, such as police access to the database. Critics of the project have recommended that legal safeguards be put in place to protect volunteers before recruitment begins, and that volunteers be made aware of the risks. They also recommend that the government invest in research into encryption techniques to ensure the data is secure.

Among cancer researchers contacted by Nature Medicine, news of the planned National Cancer Tissue Resource—as the tumor bank will be called—has received an enthusiastic response, however. “I think this is an excellent idea and well overdue,” says John Timms, leader of the cancer proteomics group at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, University College London.

In relatively rare cancers such as ovarian cancer, researchers have not been able to characterize molecular markers that would predict a patient's response to drugs. “The problem has been access to tissue coupled with very good clinical information,” says James Brenton of the Hutchison/MRC Research Centre in Cambridge.

The tumor bank will take advantage of National Health Service resources to standardize sample collection and ensure tissue data are stored with the relevant pathological and clinical data. Tissue collection centers will be linked with processing centers, where researchers will perform a battery of analyses involving DNA, RNA and possibly proteomics. Investigators will use tissue microarrays to store and analyze large quantities of data provided by hundreds of patients in clinical trials, and store the data anonymously in a central information system.

Meanwhile, an MRC subcommittee on 4 April released a consultation document on the council's future investment strategy, in which it recommended that the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, the oldest and largest of the MRC institutes, be scaled down and moved to another MRC site—possibly Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. According to Radda, this is part of the council's ongoing work to make sure that the institute remains viable in the post-genomic era, but the debate is still open. The consultation period ends in July, when the committee will consider its findings.