INBRAIN (INdiana Center for Biomarker Research In Neuropsychiatry)

We plan to collect postmortem brains and fluids from donors with major psychiatric disorders (bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, autism), and matched normal controls. The samples will be collected using state of the art protocols modeled after the Harvard Brain Bank and the University of California/Pritzker Consortium Brain Bank. As an innovation, we will collect brain and peripheral fluids (blood, CSF, urine) from the same individuals, which will permit this collection to be used for neuropathological, gene expression, proteomic and metabolomic studies, including peripheral biomarker studies.

The samples will be quality controlled (post-mortem interval, pH, RNA integrity), would have neuropatholgical report to rule out other co-morbidities, would have good clinical annotation obtained from medical records and next of kin interview, and would have toxicology testing for medications and drug of abuse.

IRB approval has been obtained, and samples have been collected already as part of pilot work for this project.

The goal of this project is to build a state of the art regional brain bank to provide tissues for neuropsychiatric research to qualified investigators from academia and industry.

Significance.  As we are entering the post-genomic era, validation of findings and pursuing hypothesis-driven studies at an anatomical and cellular level are gaining more importance as ways of making sense of the plethora of data coming out of discovery-type approaches, such as Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS).

In the News:

Back to the Future
(Link: http://www.indystar.com/article/20120107/LIVING01/301070001/IU-researchers-examining-decades-old-stash-brains)