Victorian Brain Bank

The Victorian Brain Bank (VBB) is a research resource facility that provides researchers, both in Australia and internationally, with post-mortem human brain tissue and related samples to facilitate research into various brain and mind conditions.

For over 20 years the VBB has collected brains from generous donors, forming a collection that spans most disease areas. This collection supports research that will hopefully lead to improvements in diagnosis, the development of early diagnostic tests and effective treatments.

The Victorian Brain Bank is no longer able to accept brain and spinal cord registration. Fortunately, the number of brains and spinal cords in most of the disease categories, within the collection, are large enough to support ongoing research for many years. Rare case donations can be discussed on a one-on-one basis via phone call or email.

Professor Catriona McLean has over 30 years’ experience in brain banking and is the diagnostic neuropathologist for all the cases referred to the VBB for diagnosis and research.

The neuropathology diagnostic service:

• is relied on for validating research studies using emerging technologies such as neuroimaging, neurogenomics and neuroproteomics
• confirms a pre-mortem clinical diagnosis, and increases clinicians’ awareness and understanding of atypical presentations of certain brain diseases
• precludes an organic basis for psychiatric illness that confounds successful diagnostic classification of these disorders
• confirms a diagnosis for donor families, in whom neurological disease may have hereditary or familial association and may be at risk of developing the disease
• generates pathological description of brain diseases and advances knowledge of some brain pathologies, thus providing a powerful tool for education and research
• generates important health statistics
• provides a valuable training opportunity for future neuropathologists and the neuroscience community.