The COVID-19 outbreak was unprecedented in its speed and scale of infection, causing more than seven hundreds of millions of infections of which 1/10 died worldwide, severely damaging the health systems and economies globally. In order to strengthen the national epidemic prevention strategy and promote the development of national vaccine production, infectious disease diagnostic reagents and drugs, it is imperative to establish a national integrated platform for collecting X-pathogens causing emerging infectious diseases and clinical specimens to increase the efficiency and speed for responding future unpredictable epidemic outbreaks. Consequently, the government supported and encouraged National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) to establish National Infectious Diseases Bank (NIDB) in 2020.

NHRI broke ground on the NIDB building in October, 2023. Today (December 19, 2024) NIDB moves one step forward holding the Beam-Raising Ceremony with the blessings from hundreds of people, officiated by Dr. Jih-Haw Chou, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Health and Welfare and led by Dr. Huey-Kang Sytwu, President of National Health Research Institutes.

The mission of NIDB is to collect and share significant infectious pathogens, clinical specimens and derivatives of pathogens to academia and industries to develop diagnosis, therapy, and prevention for infectious diseases. The well-kept materials will be investigated by academia and industries. In addition, NIDB has other missions such as providing pathogen-related consultancy services, sequencing services, immunocompromised animal model research services and so on. Through the establishment of NIDB, we hope to enhance the capability of fighting against the outbreak of infectious diseases. Being a member of the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC) and the Asian Consortium for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Microbial Resources (ACM) will facilitate NIDB establishing international collaborations.