The NIH NeuroBioBank: creating opportunities for human brain research

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) NeuroBioBank is a federally funded research resource for human neurologic diseases and disorders. This chapter will discuss the principles that guided the creation of the NIH NeuroBioBank and the rationale for the resource model selected. In addition, we will describe some performance metrics in the first 2 years and highlight recent advances in biomedical neuroscience that could only have been achieved using postmortem human tissues. The NIH NeuroBioBank was created in order to increase availability of high-quality postmortem human brain tissues to the research community across a broad spectrum of neurologic diseases and disorders, and to achieve economies of scale over previous funding and organizational models. In addition, we aim to increase public awareness about the value of human tissue donation for research by providing web-based information to the public and through active outreach to disease advocacy communities. Studies with human brain tissue have led to a rapid increase in our knowledge of the biologic differences between humans and are bridging the divide between humans and model organisms. Studies of human brain are beginning to give us a glimpse not only into what makes us uniquely human as well as how individual biology may be connected to health and disease.