The UK Multiple Sclerosis Tissue Bank

The UK Multiple SclerosisTissue Bank
Welcome Introduction How to register as a tissue donor Raising awareness of all those affected by MS Donation of Tissue Requesting tissue for research on multiple sclerosis Promoting the Tissue Bank in the research community The Bank Statement Issue One Issue Two Issue Three Articles MS Matters Insight - Banking on the future MS Frontiers - A very special bank MS Frontiers - Making a very special contribution Links: Department of Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience Department of Neuropathology Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies E-mail: ukmstissuebank@imperial.ac.uk	the Bank Statement Issue Two (The Bank Statement is also available as a PDF document.) Need for tissue from people that did not have MS Scientists need to study tissue from MS patients side-by-side with tissue from people who did not have MS (“normal controls”) and tissue from people who had conditions other than MS (“disease controls”). Only by making these comparisons can they identify the changes that are caused by MS. Up to now, we have concentrated on recruiting people with MS on to our donor scheme, with the result that only 22% of the 2,186 people registered on the scheme do not have MS. So, we need more people without MS to register as donors to help research on MS. Fulfilling last wishes Over the last six years, we have been in the privileged position of fulfilling the last wishes of 194 people who had lived with MS and 20 individuals who did not have the condition. This graph shows how, over the six years, we have accrued tissue from these 214 donors – all of whom wanted to help find even better treatments for MS. Accrual of 214 tissue samples red line - MS donors blue line - non-MS donors 70% already used in research We have been overwhelmed by the willingness of a range of professionals to help us with this task – including doctors, nurses, coroner’s officers and pathology technicians; all working together to retrieve donated tissue as soon as possible after death. Their goodwill and the effectiveness of our collection procedure has allowed us to process tissue from 70% of our donors within 24 hours of death; quite a feat considering our donors are drawn from across the whole of the UK. What is more, tissue from 70% of all our donors has already been used in research. A Resource for Research As well as raising the awareness of the MS community to our work, we have also been promoting the Tissue Bank as a “Resource for Research” in the scientific community. As a result of these promotional exercises and the high quality of service that we offer to researchers, the number of studies that the Tissue Bank supports has steady grown as seen in the graph below. We are now providing tissue and/or cerebrospinal fluid samples to 57 different projects. 57 projects supported over 6 years page 2 page 1/ page 2/ page 3/ page 4/ page 5/ page 6/
	The UK Multiple Sclerosis Tissue Bank Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health Imperial College London Charing Cross Campus Fulham Palace Road London W6 8RF Tel: 020 8846 7324 Fax: 020 8846 7500 E-mail: ukmstissuebank@imperial.ac.uk
*The UK Multiple Sclerosis Tissue Bank is funded by the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, registered charity 207495.*