MS brain bank

DENVER - Colorado researchers are leading the way in finding a cure for MS. Now the CU Medical Complex houses a crucial piece of that puzzle.It's a state of the art "brain bank" with donated tissues from around the world.
These freezers hold the key to unlocking the cause of multiple sclerosis.
They contain what will soon be the world's largest collection of brain tissue donated by MS patients.
Patients like Leslie Kane who plans to donate.
“It’s a gift that's infinite. There may be someone in one year that, a student who learns something from the brain that you donate, or there may be someone ten years from now that learns something from your gift,” said Kane.
These are samples of normal, versus MS-infected brain tissues; among more than 350 here.
Studying the differences in each give researchers the best hope of finding a cure.
"There's really no substitute for actual human tissue because we learn a lot about the actual disease process itself in the human organism and there's just no substitute for that," said John Corboy, M.D.
MRI scans show the difference in a normal brain and one with MS indicated by the arrows.
With more than 9,000 patients here, Colorado has one of the highest concentrations of this devastating disease.
Paradoxically Colorado donors are the best because their tissue can be retrieved quickly and brought here sooner.
“The most valuable brain tissue is that which we can retrieve very quickly and prepare that's what researcher find the most valuable so if people in Colorado where there is a high incidence rate choose to participate in this research it's very valuable for researchers all around the world,” said Karen Wenzel with the Rocky Mountains MS Center.
Just in the last few years those researchers, using the tissue here, have published the most promising work yet toward solving the mystery of a disease with no known cause or cure.
The CU Brain and Tissue Bank is expected to expand to more than 1,000 samples in the near future.
It costs about $2,000 to process a brain for research.
A lot of the funding for that research comes from the National MS Society