The Brain Tissue Resource Center (BTRC) was established at the McLean Hospital in 1978 at a time when there was great excitement about the recent discovery that there were a vast number of new neurochemical substances in the brain. Since a few of these chemical transmitters had been found to be altered in certain disorders such as Parkinson's, Huntington's (HD) and Alzheimer's diseases as well as schizophrenia, neuroscientists were anxious to obtain tissue from patients dying with these disorders in order to elicit the cause of these abnormalities. The BTRC was developed to collect tissue from two disorders: HD and schizophrenia. In the early years the success in collecting brains was overwhelming for HD tissue but only modest for schizophrenia. With public awareness of researchers' need for brain tissue high among the families with HD, very little effort was needed to mobilize their cooperation. The greatest amount of BTRC effort has been expended on public education of the family members with a mental illness. Consequently there has been a steady increase in the number of brains collected from those dying with a mental illness. The BTRC has been asked to expand into a number of other psychiatric and neurological disorders. To date the BTRC has collected over 2300 postmortem brains. Over 500 neuroscientists have received tissue for their research and over 400 publications have resulted from the use of brain tissue from the BTRC. The BTRC has had to keep up with the latest neuroscience techniques and has continually had to modify and diversify the methods of brain collection to provide suitable tissue for neuroscientists. The goal in the next 5 years will be to expand the number of neuropsychiatric cases collected and provide tissue suitable for molecular biologists.
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