The NTB has samples of neurological tissue (brain and spinal cord) and post-mortem cerebrospinal fluid from over 2,300 donors clinically assessed before death, diagnosed with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, frontotemporal dementia and prion diseases. The NTB also has samples of patients without neurodegenerative diseases; these samples are key for the comparison of the disease with the control situation.
The Biobank, located in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona, includes paraffin-embedded, frozen and cryopreserved samples, as well as tissue preserved in formalin from the different regions of the central nervous system and makes them available for biomedical research in the form of sections or fragments of tissue. The Biobank participates in research projects and clinical trials. Moreover, it carries out a detailed neuropathological diagnosis of interest for the differential diagnosis and sends it to the medical professional of reference and the family of the person donating neurological tissue.
The NTB forms part of the EBRAINS infrastructure (EBRAINS: European Brain Research Infrastructures), as well as multiple Neurological Tissue Banks consortia, both nationally (NTB Working Group of the ISCIII National Platform of Biomodels and Biobanks ) and internationally (Down Syndrome Biobank Consortium, Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative, DIAN-TU, Pick´s Disease International Consortium, etc.).
