Population-scale biobanks enhance opportunities to study disease and population health by enabling access to biomedical information that is linked with health, lifestyle and environmental data • Nesting biospecimen collection in cohort studies enables us to address research questions that were previously unanswerable • Although there are practical and ethical challenges related to population biobanking research, Australian cohort studies such as the 45 and Up Study can be enriched by biospecimen collection, because of their size, quality of data collected, and existing governance mechanisms