What We Do

The Brain Endowment Bank is a Brain Biorepository, with linked clinical and pathologic information on each case.  Many activities are necessary in order to obtain, maintain, and distribute brain specimens for research. The Brain Endowment Bank, gifts from community support groups, and individual donations support this effort.

Community Awareness Efforts
Community awareness is one of the first steps to educate the public about the need for brain donations.

The staff at the Brain Endowment Bank provides community awareness presentations free of charge to groups interested in brain donation. Click on the link to sign up for a free community awareness presentation.  These presentations include information on how diseases affect the brain, the importance of brain donation, and new directions for treatment of brain illnesses.  Advances in molecular genetics and neuroscience are occurring at a very rapid pace, making the gift of a brain for research a most valuable and permanent research resource.

To become a registered donor
People, who are interested in making this donation, should contact our staff.

Our staff will answer questions regarding donation and provides additional materials as requested by potential donors.  If donors are ready to enroll in our program, we will complete an initial medical evaluation questionnaire.

We provide registration packets that include confidentiality and medical release forms and additional questionnaires.  This information is important to provide a comprehensive assessment of medications and other conditions before death. This information is kept strictly confidential. Coded information is entered into a Patient Registry Live Donor Database.  Our staff will confirm that the registration process is complete with a letter to the donor.

Maintaining the registry of over 800 live donors includes annual follow up contacts.  For example, once each year, our brain donors are contacted either by phone or a letter to ensure that we have up to date demographic information.  At this time, we will answer any additional questions about the arrangements to be made to ensure all aspects of the donation have been met. We maintain a donor’s medical file by obtaining current medical authorizations from donors and requesting information from doctors and neurologists.

We are very interested in normal aging.  Specifically, our program has a large group of healthy brain donors, who are aging very well into their 8th, 9th and 10th decade. Our staff members work directly with donors over the age of 80 and conduct annual telephone cognitive testing.  A database of these testing results supports neuroscientific research on normal brain aging. Florida ranks high in the number of elderly residents, making it a unique population laboratory.

Our staff provide 24 hour on call services to coordinate and assist family members, nursing homes, mortuaries, and pathologists to complete the brain donation at the time of death. There is no cost for a brain donation.  The brain donation does not interfere with an open casket viewing, cremation or funeral services.

Developing a National Pathology Network
This effort would not be possible without the generous support of pathologists, mortuary and funeral service providers.  Our program has an extensive list of contacts.  Our national pathology network includes dieners (pathologists who will make the actual removal and preserve and courier the brain to the University of Miami biorepository).

We maintain an active dialog with donor’s selected mortuaries or funeral homes across the US, providing procedures and Brain Donor Alert Stickers to ensure that we are contacted at the brain bank so that donation can be made within 12 hours after death.

Community Networking And Liaison Work
Brain bank staff work with the family members and other institutions to obtain pertinent data regarding the death, death certificates, pathology reports, legal and medical reports that add important information for researchers.  We obtain a neuropathological evaluation after death. This information is provided to the family usually within three to six months after death.

Brain Tissue Dissemination To Researchers
The Brain Endowment Bank distributes brain tissues to scientists worldwide who are investigating neurodegenerative or neuropsychiatric diseases.  One brain donated to research can support the work of many neuroscientists.

Tissue samples are available in the following preparations:

• Fresh quick-frozen tissue blocks or coronal sections (nitrogen vapor or dry ice frozen)
• Passive frozen hemispheres (Dissection of specific anatomic regions)
• Formalin-fixed hemispheres (specific anatomic regions)

The fresh quick-frozen specimens are optimally preserved with minimal ice artifact formation. These specimens are suitable for the widest variety of applications, including receptor binding, immunocytochemistry, in situ hybridization, virus detection, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), DNA sequencing, mRNA isolation, and certain neurochemical assays.

Tissue specimens will be shipped to your location, as appropriate samples become available for your study.

Staff members provide approved researchers with request forms for specific tissues for their study, both control as well as diseased brain tissue.  Once forms are received, brain tissue specimens are prepared and shipped to the research scientist.