Brain Bank in India
By Dr.Ravi at 26 February, 2010, 7:59 pm
I was reading some news and that got my mind. Yes it is the brain bank.
Even though as a doctor there are many people who don’t know what exactly the brain bank works and what are the researches that are done there. So here is a simple sight on that.
Brain is such a tissue that can not be transplanted like liver or kidney.So it has to be obtained from the donors and then has to be study with care.
Even many times the studies like PET scan and MRI can not penetrate the neurons. So scientists need the brain from the donars to make the tests and get results for cure.
India has a single brain bank and that too at NIMHANS institute Bangalore. It is the only institute where the normal and diseased brains are preserved at a very low temperatures of around 70 degree Celsius and those are made available to the research people. Dr. S.K. Shankar, professor and head of department of neuropathology (the study of disease of nervous system tissue) at NIMHANS.
In india there are currently only 500 neuroscientists while those of 400000 of US.The reason is clear as there are many government and non-govt. blood banks there.
Some common diseases on which the studies are done are as follows : (As per given on NIMHANS Website)
Detailed Neuropathological studies on Japanese Encepalitis, HSV, Rabies, HIV Viral Encephalitis.
Pathology of Neurotuberculosis, with special reference to involvement of Hypothalamus and Brain and its relation to sudden death.
Study of Cytoskeletal Pathology in normal ageing and Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and ALS.
Descriptive Epidemiology of CJD in India.
Established routine diagnostic laboratory for Myopathology (including Histochemistry, Immunohistochemistry and Ultrastructural study).
Pathology of Lafora body disease, Ceroid Lipofuscinosis, Myoclonic Epilepsy, Mitochondrial Myopathy and Dystropohinopathies.
Detailed study to assess regeneration across pretreated peripheral nerve Allograft by cold preservation without Immunosuppression – studied on rat sciatic nerve grafts.
Expression of p67 (MUNC- 18), a noval neuronal protein and regulator of CDK – 5 has been studied in developing rat and human fatal nervous system and in adult rat and human brains and in human CNS tumors.
Biology of Neuroepithelial tumors with emphasis on recurrent Neoplasma.
Some interesting facts about Brain bank:-
- The New York Brain Bank at Columbia University has gone online to allow brain researchers to precisely select the samples for studies.
- Harvard’s brain bank, located at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, is the world’s largest brain repository, distributing tissue specimens to nearly 4,000 researches in the US and around the world every year
- Brain scientist Sandra Witelson in Canada is believed to have the world’s largest collection of non-diseased human brains. She also got to dissect the Nobel laureate Albert Einstein’s brain in 1999 and reported some new features overlooked by fellow neuroscientists in the US: that the father of relativity’s parietal lobe, the region responsible for visual thinking and spatial reasoning, was 15 per cent larger than average, and it was structured as one distinct compartment, instead of the usual two compartments separated by the Sylvian fissure. For over ten years, the professor who has her lab at McMaster University in Ontario is carrying on her analysis of Einstein’s brain.
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