The roles of Material Transfer Agreements in genetics databases and Bio-banks

In this paper, we will analyse the role (or better the roles) that a specific document, the Material Transfer Agreement (MTA), has accrued in the exchange of bio-materials between research institutions. We will see how fundamental such documents have become in the most recent years, and that an uncontrolled proliferation of them could bring about a highly inefficient market situation. We will further see how standardisation will partially fix the problems connected to the exchange of bio-materials and bio-samples. However, whilst standardisation possesses undeniable advantages, it has to cope with a minimum level of flexibility, otherwise it will not be able to catch the huge varieties of situations involved. We will finally observe, how new digital and web-based collaborative efforts can contribute to achieve such trade-off between standardisation and flexibility.