Biomaterial banks: Preventing wild growth, enabling long-term use. The establishment and operation of large biomaterial banks is becoming increasingly important. Material banks that make samples available for medical-scientific analyses over the long term offer great potential for addressing pressing questions in medical research. This is especially true when the samples are combined with data on the disease progression of the respective patients. The increasing networking in biomedical research also leads to the creation of overarching data and sample collections. This raises a multitude of legal and organizational questions for which there has previously been no clear regulation in Germany. The TMF has addressed these questions and clarified many aspects in an interdisciplinary project, which are now available to researchers in the form of guidelines and template texts.