Brain Banking

Inge Huitinga completed her study Medical Biology in 1988 at the VUmc in Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD degree on the investigation of mechanisms of demyelination in multiple sclerosis (MS) cum laude at the Vrije Universiteit in 1992. Between 1992 and 1999 Inge continued working on the pathology of MS, part at VUmc, part at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) in the group of prof. Dick Swaab, and part in Oxford, UK. In 1999 she received as the first the prestigious MS Fellowship of the Stichting MS Research, to investigate neuronal functioning in MS and was appointed at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science (KNAW). In 2006 she became director of the Netherlands Brain Bank (NBB) and started her own Neuroimmunology Research Group and published more than 120 scientific papers on MS with a focus on MS and microglia and effects of steroid hormones. She professionalized the NBB and drafted international ethical and legal guidelines for Brain Banking resulting in a Code of Conduct for Brain Banking, published in 2015. In 2012 she obtained a substantial NWO grant of 3.45 M-euro to start a brain bank for psychiatry within the NBB: NHB-Psy, a national consortium of NBB/KNAW with 5 Dutch university medical centers to run a brain donation and autopsy program for 7 psychiatric diseases.Tissue of these donors are sent to researchers worldwide.https://nin.nl/research/researchgroups/huitinga-group/ www.brainbank.nlwww.nbb-psy.nl

Dr. Maree Jean Webster is from the Stanley Medical Research Institute, Laboratory of Brain Research, in Rockville, Maryland, USA.