Brain banking - science
The UK has a long tradition of established brain banks that already provide high quality post-mortem brain tissue for diagnosis and research into disorders of the central nervous system (CNS).
Brain banks provide a rich yet underused source of human brain tissue that has already made a huge contribution to progress in the neurosciences, through research into the cause, diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric disease. A pivotal early example was the discovery of deficient dopamine levels in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease, which led to the development of l-dopa treatment. Other breakthroughs included the discovery and characterisation of the amyloid deposition in Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy bodies in dementia, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) and the role of glutamate in schizophrenia. A recently introduced treatment (anticholinesterase) for the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease came from observations of abnormal nerve cells in autopsy tissue. More recently, the use of brain tissue samples was critical in discovering the role of a genetic code variation in the overproduction of a version of a protein (neuregulin) thought to contribute to the development of schizophrenia.
We need more basic knowledge of neurological and psychiatric diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression. This will lead to a better understanding of the abnormal mechanisms operating in these diseases, which in turn will help develop new approaches to treatment. With advances in technology it is now feasible to conduct large scale studies of genetic variability in the control of gene expression, but this requires high quality and well-characterised human brain tissue samples.
The purpose of the network is to support this research by providing appropriate tissue in an efficient and cost-effective manner, while meeting uniformly high standards of operation and accountability.