By Alison Palmer, Evaluation and Special Projects Lead
Canada has one of the largest banks of brain tissue in the world, the Douglas-Bell Canada Brain Bank, which has received longstanding platform support from Brain Canada and other partners and has achieved significant research impact.
- This one-of-a-kind platform houses more than 3,600 brains, maintained in the best possible conditions for cutting-edge scientific research.
- It distributes more than 2,000 brain samples on an annual basis to dozens of researchers across Canada and around the world.
- It has enabled countless breakthroughs on everything from the effects of early-life adversity on the brain, to why disparities in depression rates and treatment efficacy differs between men and women.
- According to the Overton Index, the world’s largest policy and grey literature database, one of the Brain Bank’s seminal publications has informed suicide prevention policy documents around the world.
Generating a body of advanced knowledge
The 3,600 brains housed at the Brain Bank include donors who have experienced neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and other dementias, as well as diverse mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder, and substance use disorders.
“We are one of a kind,” explains Dr. Turecki. “There are not many brain banks around the world, and we are solicited all the time as a provider of good quality brain tissue. Access to brain tissue is essential to advancing our understanding of the brain.”
The more than 2,000 brain samples that the Brain Bank prepares for researchers in Canada and around the world each year have been used to generate over 110 peer-reviewed scientific publications, many of them significant research breakthroughs, including:
Example 1: Using brains of individuals who experienced child abuse, researchers identified biological and molecular effects of early-life adversity, which is a major predictor of mental illness. These effects include dysregulation in specific immune and metabolic pathways, and in the oxytocin system, and persistent changes in neuroplasticity within the prefrontal cortex.
“This was the first demonstration that early life adversity, or traumatic experiences in early life, leaves a scar on the brain – a mark that could be quantified and measured,” says Dr. Turecki. “We gave media interviews about this work for over a year. And we received thousands of messages from people thanking us for making sense of their experience. For people who had faced adversity early in life and were facing severe chronic depression as adults, for example, this finding was validation, to say ‘look, it’s not just in my imagination’.”
Example 2: Using brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, researchers discovered that the most common form of Alzheimer’s disease is associated with a deficiency in a protein called BMI1; when BMI1 stops being expressed normally, the lesions characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease begin appearing in the brain. Several research groups are now applying this finding to explore new therapeutic strategies, including small molecules and gene therapy to restore BMI1 and halt the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
Example 3: Using brains of depressed individuals, researchers identified the precise cell types affected in men who have suffered from major depression and how they differ from those affected in women. They also identified indicators of a patients’ response to treatment for depression. These findings about single cells explain some of the disparities in depression rates and treatment efficacy between the sexes and will inform future screening and treatment approaches for depression tailored to sex.
“The Brain Bank will have a huge impact on the development of knowledge about single cells,” Dr. Turecki explains. Single cell technology is a revolution in resolution, allowing researchers to develop detailed cellular atlases and unravel complex biological processes in unprecedented detail.
We’re providing brain tissue to a lot of researchers using single cell genomics technology to address many questions that weren’t possible to answer before, about the diversity of cells in the brain, how the brain is organized, how it functions, how the brain cells are connected with each other, and more.
Dr. Turecki
Example 4: Using brains of healthy controls, researchers identified key features involved in generating new neurons in the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. This very recent finding, which requires testing at a larger scale, demonstrates a promising capacity for brain plasticity in the hippocampus throughout life. Brain plasticity has important implications for recovery from brain injury and stroke, prevention
Informing policy on suicide prevention
The 2016 Lancet publication, Suicide and suicidal behaviours by Brain Bank co-lead Dr. Gustavo Turecki and colleague Dr. David Brent has been cited more 1,500 times in the academic literature, including several clinical trials, a testament to the platform’s success in enabling research impact.
According to the Overton Index, this paper has also been cited more than two dozen times in policy documents from around the world. The Overton Index tracks over 18 million policy documents from 188 countries. Policy documents are documents written primarily for or by policymakers that are published by a policy-focused source and are used to guide decisions, actions, allocation of resources, and procedures.
The policy documents citing Dr. Turecki’s work include clinical guidelines and government publications, varying from calls to action to international, national and regional prevention plans and outcome reports. Document authors include UNICEF, the OECD, the Government of Canada, the Analysis and Policy Observatory of Australia, the Haute Autorité de Santé of France, the Finnish Medical Society, the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the States of California, Georgia, Michigan, and Texas, and many others.
While the number of lives saved because of these several dozen policy documents is not captured in the database, what is clear is that the Brain Bank has been highly influential in informing policy and justifying action to prevent suicide and save lives.
On a more individual level, the Brain Bank also has an important impact on the lives of people who helped in the donation process.
We help the coroner’s office with their investigations and work collaboratively with them, allowing us to support the families that have lost loved ones to better understand what happened and to get closure. For families that have lost loved ones to suicide, and go on to donate that brain to research, it gives meaning to their terrible loss.
Dr. Turecki
Dr. Gustavo Turecki and co-lead Dr. Naguib Mechawar at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute were awarded a $2.14 million Platform Support Grant (PSG) in 2019 for The Douglas-Bell Canada Brain Bank: supporting human brain research in Canada and beyond. This grant built upon a previous iteration of the platform, also supported through the PSG program starting in 2014. The PSG 2019 grant was made possible with the financial support of Health Canada, through the Canada Brain Research Fund, an innovative partnership between the Government of Canada (through Health Canada) and Brain Canada, and the Réseau québécois suicide, les troubles de l’humeur et troubles associés (RQSHA), and the Douglas Research Centre.