Clinical research is an essential activity to understand the causes of diseases and to generate new treatments. It depends entirely on the participation of patients and their families, who allow altruistically preserving their samples for use in research.
Thanks to these samples, a lot of studies can be performed, progressing in the knowledge of respiratory diseases and related, such as asthma, COPD, chronic bronchitis, cystic fibrosis or lung cancer, among others, helping to the future patients.
Samples donation means no additional risk to the donor, since samples are obtained during test and/or procedures that are performed due to the disease. In the case of surgery, the removed tissue is sent to pathologic anatomy laboratory in order to know the diagnosis, and the excess tissue, generally discarded, is the tissue donated for the research purposes.