The PDS Tissue Bank at Imperial aims to help understand what causes Parkinson's and assist in the development of better drug treatments by providing high quality brain tissue to researchers working in the field of Parkinson's and related neurological disorders. The Tissue Bank also aims to enhance the public's awareness of Parkinson's, promote the work of the Tissue Bank and increase the numbers of volunteers who are willing to sign up to the donor scheme. The Tissue Bank also aims to collect the tissue so that it is suitable for all research needs and that it is collected in the most ethical manner.

One of the problems with doing clinical research into PD is that we know we do not always get the diagnosis correct. The only way to be 100% sure that someone has PD is to look at their brain under a microscope after they have died. When this has been done, studies have shown that 10-25% of people who experts thought had PD turned out not to have the condition. Getting the diagnosis wrong will obviously flaw any research. For example, if patients with conditions that progress more rapidly than PD are misdiagnosed as having PD and included in research like ours, PD will appear to worsen quicker than it really does.

We wish to thank everyone who is participating in the PINE study.

Scientific research is a rapidly advancing field with new techniques being developed frequently. Hence, it is vitally important that the Tissue Bank collects and stores its tissue so that it can be used in research using a variety of research techniques, in order to advance Parkinson's research. Consequently, when a tissue donation occurs we handle the tissue in a number of ways so as to maximise its use. Part of the brain and spinal cord is frozen very rapidly or "snap" frozen so as to preserve the cellular components such as enzymes and genetic information. Such tissue can be preserved by keeping it frozen at very cold temperatures e.g. -85^oC. This tissue can be supplied to a researcher in the form of thin tissue sections that can for example be used to localise genetic material at the cellular level, or as blocks, so that researchers can, for example, examine the activity of enzymes in a brain region. Alternately, the tissue can be placed in a preserving solution called "fixative". This type of tissue is primarily used to carry out the neuropathological diagnosis of the case i.e. identify whether a person had Parkinson's or not. This type of tissue is also highly popular with researchers too, since they can histologically stain thin sections to identify markers, e.g. alpha-synuclein (a protein implicated in Parkinson's), at the cellular level.

The first pie chart below show the types of tissue requested by researchers and as you can see all the different types of tissue offered by the Tissue Bank are being used in research. Whilst the second pie chart, indicates the different research areas utilising the tissue. As the pie chart indicates, a wide variety of research areas, ranging from genetic to drug induced dyskinesias, are utilising the tissue. This demonstrates that the Tissue Bank is fulfilling its role of collecting tissue for a wide variety of uses.