About NBB-MS
The Netherlands Brain Bank (NBB)
The Netherlands Brain Bank for MS (NBB-MS) is part of the Netherlands Brain Bank (NBB) which is a department of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN). The mission of the NBB is to facilitate cutting edge human brain research by providing the scientific community with the highest quality post mortem tissue with ultra-short post mortem delays (on average 6 h, with max. 12 h) of patients and matched controls in combination with clinico-neuropathological documentation.
The Netherlands Brain Bank for MS (NBB-MS)
The pathology of multiple sclerosis (MS) is complex and heterogenic. The vision of NBB-MS is that innovative research using well characterized high quality brain tissue of MS patients and control subjects will lead to scientific breakthroughs regarding the understanding of pathology and heterogeneity of MS, thereby improving prognoses and yield novel effective therapeutic strategies to halt MS.
Therefore since 1990, the NBB specifically focused on the registration of MS patients and their family members. In 2000, in close collaboration with the department of Radiology at Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc, the NBB started a post mortem MRI program for MS autopsies, resulting in MRI-guided dissection of MS lesions and facilitation of translational studies to relate tissue findings to MRI parameters at Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc (read more about this here).
Since the start of the MS brain donation program, 309 MS patients came to autopsy and currently more than 600 MS patients are registered as brain donors with on average 15 MS autopsies annually over 2015–2019. In 2017 a dedicated branch of NBB focused on MS, NBB-MS, was launched. NBB-MS is a cooperation between the NBB and the Neuroimmunology research group of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. NBB-MS facilitates collaborations on the MS cohort as a whole together with the other MS Centers in the Netherlands, joint in MS-Neth, to unravel the molecular basis of clinical, pathological, radiological and genetic heterogeneity of MS.
This list shows the publications that have resulted from research using NBB-MS tissue. In addition the thesis of Dr. Nina L. Fransen describes an analysis of the NBB-MS autopsy cohort: Dr. Nina L. Fransen, Heterogeneity of the Immunopathology in Advanced Multiple Sclerosis: an Autopsy Cohort Analysis (2021). The full thesis can be read here:
