A brain donation is a precious gift. We deeply appreciate all brain donors and families who have chosen to advance human brain research through the Iowa NeuroBank Core.

This non-profit Core facility is a university research service that provides human specimens for researchers to explore the pathogenesis of human brain diseases, including Alzheimer's disease. 

While collecting human blood samples for clinical trials, our current effort is focusing on the human tissue management and distribution to support academic researchers locally, nationally, and internationally. Your gifts have made powerful, meaningful, and lasting changes for better diagnosis, research, education, and therapeutics. Please see our publications and below.

Diagnostics:

Many brain disorders (such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease) can only be diagnosed with certainty by examining the brain after death. Some psychiatric diseases can also cause identifiable changes in the brain. Even in diseases that can be confirmed by genetic or another testing, examination of brain tissue can reveal additional diseases or unexpected effects of a known disease.

Research and Education:

While substantial progress has been made in understanding these disorders with animal models, there are still many unanswered questions to be addressed in human brains. The limited supply of donated tissues is a barrier to progress in understanding these human brain disorders.

Therapeutic and Technology Development:

By increasing the amount of tissue available for research, researchers will be able to support biotech and pharmaceutical discovery to better understand how to prevent, diagnose, treat and cure human brain disorders.