BRAIN UK: accessing NHS tissue archives for neuroscience research (2015-2019)

神经系统疾病对个人、社会和经济造成了巨大且日益加重的负担。尽管有例外，但人们对从动物模型中学习的局限性越来越感到沮丧，这强调了研究人体组织的重要性。神经病理学家在NHS医院工作，检查从手术（活组织检查）或尸检中获得的大脑和相关组织样本。他们的工作是识别异常，做出诊断，并试图了解异常是如何产生的。神经病理学作为一门专业在英国已经存在了40-50年，作为这项工作的结果，在全国范围内建立了诊断证实组织的大量档案。这些档案包含大量来自各种神经系统疾病的组织，包括中风、头部损伤、肿瘤、感染、精神疾病、发育障碍和许多罕见疾病等常见疾病，是一种未得到充分利用的研究资源。BRAIN UK（英国大脑档案信息网络）将26个地区NHS临床神经科学中心的神经病理学部门的组织档案联网，形成一个虚拟的脑库，充当“媒人”的角色，将需要组织的研究人员与合适的样本联系起来。通过BRAIN UK，研究人员可以从影响大脑、脊髓、神经、肌肉和眼睛的各种疾病中获得40万份样本。BRAIN UK获得了伦理许可，涵盖了大多数项目，节省了研究人员大量的时间，否则他们将不得不独立获得批准。在过去的4年里，英国大脑已经在英国和海外的许多中心支持了48个研究项目。在接下来的4年里，我们希望继续从现有资源中为研究人员提供组织，并增加新获得的样本，每年可获得16000个样本。我们还旨在收集通过BRAIN UK获得的研究人员对组织进行研究的结果，形成一个研究结果的中央登记册，这将有利于想要对这些组织样本进行新研究的新研究人员。最后，我们将把BRAIN UK与英国生物银行（UK Biobank）联系起来，该银行拥有50万名来自普通人群的深入研究参与者，以便更多地了解神经系统疾病的起源。据我们所知，英国大脑网络在世界上是独一无二的，而且非常经济，因为它利用了已经存储在NHS档案中的组织样本，否则这些样本将被研究人员闲置或无法使用。

Neurological diseases cause a substantial and increasing personal, social and economic burden. Although there have been exceptions, there is increasing frustration at the limitations of learning from animal models, emphasising the importance of studying human tissue. Neuropathologists work in NHS hospitals examining samples from the brain and related tissues derived from operations (biopsies) or post mortem examinations. Their job is to identify abnormalities, make a diagnosis and try to understand how the abnormalities arise. Neuropathology has existed as a specialty in the UK for 40-50 years and, as a consequence of this work, substantial archives of diagnostically verified tissue have been established nationwide. These archives contain a wealth of tissue from a great variety of neurological conditions, including common conditions such as stroke, head injury, tumours, infections, psychiatric disorders, developmental disorders and many rare conditions, and represent an underutilised resource for research. BRAIN UK (the UK BRain Archive Information Network) networks the tissue archives of neuropathology departments based in 26 regional NHS Clinical Neuroscience Centres to form a virtual brain bank, acting as a "matchmaker" linking researchers needing tissue to the appropriate samples. Through BRAIN UK researchers can gain access to >400,000 samples from a wide range of diseases affecting the brain, spinal cord, nerve, muscle and eye. BRAIN UK has ethical approval which covers the majority of projects, saving the researchers considerable time as they would otherwise have to obtain this approval independently. Over the past 4 years BRAIN UK has supported 48 research projects in many centres around the UK and overseas. In the coming 4 years we want to continue to provide tissue to researchers from existing resources and add newly obtained samples of which >16,000 are becoming available each year. We also aim to gather the results of researchers' studies performed on tissue obtained through BRAIN UK to form a central register of findings which will benefit new researchers wanting to perform new studies on these tissue samples. Finally, we will link BRAIN UK with UK Biobank, which has 500,000 intensively studied participants from the general population, in order to learn more about the origins of neurological disease. As far as we are aware, the BRAIN UK network is unique in the world and is very economical as it makes use of tissue samples already being stored in NHS archives which would otherwise be unused and unavailable to researchers.