Johns Hopkins Children's Center neurovirologist Robert Yolken, M.D., and collaborators from the Stanley Medical Research Institute have developed a large repository of brain and tissue samples to advance the understanding and treatment of bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia.
The database contains information accumulated over the last 12 years on what may be its most valuable asset: 45 human brains obtained post mortem from people with psychiatric disorders. The brain bank has a reserve of 600 brains that can be accessed for analysis as the 45-brain cohort gets depleted. The database is freely available at http://sncid.stanleyresearch.org/ to researchers from both the public and private sectors.
Brain tissue — which is rare to come by — is the most reliable "carrier" of direct clues to psychiatric and neurologic disorders because it contains biomarkers, the biological "footprints" left behind by illness, according to Yolken. Once identified, biomarkers can reveal clues about the origin of a disorder - the molecular chain of events that causes full-blown disease.
"Sharing information quickly and efficiently with fellow researchers is critical to advancing knowledge," says Yolken, who directs the Stanley Laboratory of Developmental Neurovirology at Hopkins Children's. "We encourage scientists to take advantage of this invaluable resource."
The database's inventory of 60 human brains includes 15 from people diagnosed with schizophrenia, 15 from those with bipolar disorder, and 15 from people with major depression, as well as 15 from unaffected people. In addition, the databank provides software that allows for powerful analyses of 1,749 neuropathology datasets as well as several gene expression datasets.