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What will the tissue be used for?

The challenge for MS researchers lies in unravelling the complex causes and mechanisms responsible for the damage to the central nervous system (CNS) in people with MS. The ultimate aim is to understand MS and design effective treatments for the condition.

While there are other techniques that can be used to study MS - such as experimental animal models, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and cell culture - they cannot adequately substitute for studying samples of the actual tissue damages by MS. Therefore, in order to further their studies, researchers are very reliant on samples of tissue from people with a fully comprehensive medical history.

Many questions can be addressed using multiple sclerosis tissue. Are there different forms of the disease that can be identified by the type of damage to the brain? What cells and molecules are present, and are they responsible for damage or are they useful for repair? How do the pictures produced by MRI relate to the damage to the CNS, and how do these relate to particular symptoms?

'Looking at post-mortem brain tissue is like looking at the scene of a crime. You are trying to piece together evidence to find out what has happened,' says Dr Abhi Vora, manager of the tissue bank. 'In the same way as the police look for evidence, such as fingerprints, scientists can look for a number of important clues in the tissue such as what cells or chemicals are present.'

Indeed some studies can only be carried out using MS tissue, such as the search for possible viruses that may be involved I the disease. There is a lot of interest in the loss of nerve fibres that become more vulnerable to damage following the stripping off of their myelin sheaths. Researchers need to know to what extent this happens and how early in the course of the disease it begins. This knowledge could then be used to design therapies aimed at slowing this process down.

Recently, researches have identified new proteins, called growth factors, that may be able to stimulate the replacement of lost oligodendrocytes (the cells which produce myelin, and also protect nerve fibres from damage. These studies now need to be applied to human tissue in order to assess their potential as new treatments.

page 1 - introduction
page 2 - setting up the bank
page 3 - what will the tissue be used for?
page 4 - how does the tissue bank do its work?
page 5 - how can I help?