About Us
** NEW!! ASD Research & the Bank **
Funded By the NIH
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
The UMB Brain and Tissue Bank website is dedicated to the donors and their families whose caring, love, and generosity make possible the precious gift of tissue donation.
The UMB Brain and Tissue Bank is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and is established to advance research of developmental disorders. We invite you to explore our site and learn about us. Perhaps you, too, may want to become a registered donor. Tissue and brain donation is a very precious gift.
Meaningful Research
Every year infants, children and adults are diagnosed with one of the hundreds of devastating and little understood developmental disorders. Developmental disorders are perplexing medical mysteries which can only be solved with continued and dedicated research. For this reason, the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development has funded the Brain and Tissue Banks. The goal of the Bank is to advance meaningful research on developmental disorders. Many of these disorders have their origins at birth, and are manifested early in life, but others do not occur until later in life. The Bank serves the critical purpose of collecting, preserving and distributing human tissues to qualified scientific investigators who are dedicated to the improved understanding, care and treatment of developmental disorders.
A Precious Need
In thousands of laboratories throughout our country researchers have dedicated their careers to finding a cure for everyone's ailing child, for every suffering adult. Their dedication is great, their compassion strong, but their work cannot move forward without the help of many other caring individuals.
Human tissue donated at the time of death by people of all ages, especially those afflicted with a genetic or developmental disorder, is the most precious resource on which these researchers depend.
It is in human tissues, particularly the brain, that many of these dysfunctions occur and manifest themselves. By examining these tissues, comparing the unaffected with the affected, or by comparing different age groups, scientists begin to answer endless questions.
As answers unfold so will deeper understanding, offering hope to the lives of us all.
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT
News
President’s Tenacity Award
Ron Zielke was awarded the President’s Tenacity Award from the Sturge-Weber Foundation for his persistent efforts to recruit a sufficient number of Sturge-Weber tissue donors to provide the biological material needed to identify the gene abnormality responsible for Sturge-Weber Disease and Port-Wine stains. The data from the laboratories of Drs. Comi and Pevsner were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine ("Sturge-Weber Syndrome and Port-Wine Stains Caused by Somatic Mutation in GNAQ").
