PD Brain Bank

The Parkinsonism Brain Bank at Columbia University offers pathological diagnosis to people with Parkinson's disease (PD) and related disorders. The mission of Parkinsonism Brain Bank at Columbia University is to collect, store, and distribute well-characterized brain tissue, generally with defined post-mortem times. The brain bank consists of frozen, formalin-fixed, and paraffin-embedded blocks and sections of carefully characterized, accessible tissues available to researchers throughout the country. These materials are catalogued, and the catalogue is available to researchers, without any specific individual identifiers. Through research on brain specimens, researchers at Columbia, throughout the United States, and throughout the world hope to better understand parkinsonian disorders and allow the development of rational effective therapies. The PD brain bank is funded by the Parkinson's Foundation and the team works closely with the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Columbia University (the Neuropathology Core of this Research Center). Through recent work from the PD Brain Bank, we were able to report neuropathological findings in people with PD who carry mutations in different genes linked to PD including PRKN, LRRK2 and GBA. Further, we were able to report a novel association between carriers of PPP2R5D p.E200K mutation and parkinsonism.