♦ The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) was established the country’s first diabetes biobank in Chennai in collaboration with the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation (MDRF) on 15 December 2024. The biobank set up at the MDRF, Chennai, aims to gather, process, store and distribute biospecimens to assist scientific studies with the permission of the ICMR. 
♦ The biobank contains blood samples from two major ICMR-funded studies: the ICMR-India Diabetes (ICMR-INDIAB) study conducted across States and Union Territories from 2008 to 2020, and an ongoing registry of young-onset diabetes, initiated in 2006. These samples include various types of diabetes, such as Type 1, Type 2, and gestational diabetes, and will aid future research.