The Basque Biobank for Research (o+ehun), of the BIOEF Foundation, has launched a new Brain Donation Programme in the three Basque provinces. “The programme is an essential tool for studying psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's; in this sense, the Biobank is a service to support research, with an agglutinating function, that promotes collaboration between researchers from different disciplines who want to understand why neurological diseases occur, and how they can be diagnosed and treated,” explains Roberto Bilbao, who is in charge of the Basque Biobank for Research.

The procedure enables the organ to be extracted, with prior consent, quickly and without inconvenience for the family, regardless of the place in which the donor passed away (home or health centre).

Thanks to this new programme, “the research on neurological and neurodegenerative diseases will be boosted, as will research on other diseases, especially psychiatric and vascular”. The coordination of samples by the Biobank enables all the researchers who comply with work requirements for this kind of sample to have access to the collection, thus facilitating research in this field, unlike other private collections of brains.

Bilbao highlights that the new programme “is pioneering because it is the first of its kind to coordinate the collection of samples from several provinces at the same time”. In this sense, the programme has two extraction centres: one in the Txagorritxu Hospital (Araba/Álava) for donors in Araba/Álava and Bizkaia; and another in the Donostia Hospital, for donors in Gipuzkoa.

These extraction centres were selected because of their wide experience in working with brain samples. “The Txagorritxu Hospital has been working since the late 1990s collecting samples of brains with suspected prion diseases, and has one of the best collections of brains with these diseases in Spain”.