Guardians of the brains

A remarkable facility situated on the top floor of the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences is helping researchers improve outcomes for people living with neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases.

The Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank is the only facility of its kind in New Zealand and is home to tissue from more than 1,000 brains. It’s more than just a storehouse for one of our most precious bodily organs though, it’s also a world-class scientific resource central to the groundbreaking work being carried out by researchers at the University’s Centre for Brain Research (CBR).

One of those researchers is Professor Maurice Curtis, whose work focuses on understanding the early origins of Parkinson’s disease, something he studies via the “window to the brain” – the nose.

“Six to ten years before someone goes to the doctor with a movement disorder and Parkinson’s disease they will almost all have lost their sense of smell,” explains Maurice. “So what I want to know is what is going wrong in those early olfactory areas that then lead to someone years later going to the doctor with a movement disorder. Because if we could stop it when people are losing their sense of smell, we could potentially prevent it from ever becoming Parkinson’s disease as we know it.”

Maurice is also co-director of the brain bank, a position he shares with the facility’s founder, Distinguished Professor Sir Richard Faull. As part of that role, he is the first point of contact for families after a donor passes away. Maintaining long-term relationships with the families of donors is at the heart of CBR’s approach and Maurice says his team feels a huge responsibility as custodians of their loved ones’ brains.

“It’s only because of the generosity of the family being willing to go through with the brain donation, even in their time of grief, that we actually make this happen,” he says, adding that the team at CBR is careful to adhere to tikanga Māori practices throughout the entire donation process.

“Every one of those families who have the brain of a loved one represented in the brain bank really just wants the next generation to do a little bit better than their loved one did with their neurological disease,” he says.

“They make the brain bank special, and we’re just guardians of that tissue.”

Because it’s vital brains get to the bank as soon as possible after death has occurred, the moment Maurice receives a call from a donor’s next of kin he will arrange with the local mortuary to get the brain sent to the bank’s laboratory, where it can be processed and stored. The average time from death to lab is around 16 hours, though brains have arrived within as little as two hours in the past. Once stored in the lab’s specialised freezers, brain tissue can last indefinitely.

Storing brains is only part of what the bank does though; its real mission is to make the brain tissue available for researchers – both those based at the University and others around Aotearoa or overseas.

One of Maurice’s colleagues carrying out some of that important research is Dr Brigid Ryan, who was named 2023 Alzheimer’s New Zealand Fellow for her work related to dementia. Brigid is part of a team working on a longitudinal study focusing on frontotemporal dementia. Although the study is being done on living family members, Brigid says the project “directly came out of a brain bank donation”, after the grandmother of a family who suspected they had an inherited form of dementia initially donated her brain in 2006. Testing later confirmed those suspicions and revealed the family carries a dominant mutated gene that causes dementia. Each family member who inherits the mutated gene has a 50 percent chance of passing it on to their own children, with all those receiving the gene certain to go on to develop dementia later in life. After their grandmother’s initial brain donation, other members of the family were inspired to play a role in dementia research, which led to the start of the groundbreaking longitudinal study.

“It really illustrates the impact the brain bank can have for seeding larger projects.”

Brigid says 2023 was a particularly exciting year for her research, with the first results of the study coming through.

“This is work we started in 2016 with a long-term focus, so it’s really exciting to see the data we’ve been able to generate coming together.”

Current evidence shows that in the case of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia, changes in the brain start to take place as many as 30 years before any symptoms are shown, which means “there is potentially this really long window of opportunity where we might be able to intervene and prevent those brain changes from reaching that tipping point”.

Because Brigid and her team know that members of the family carrying the genetic mutation will go on to develop dementia, they are able to track different biomarkers to see how the brain changes over time, before symptoms start setting in – something that will provide researchers with invaluable knowledge to help future generations.

Another crucial part of the brain bank’s success is its philanthropic backers. First and foremost among these benefactors is the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand, which has supported the brain bank since its humble beginnings back in 1994, as well as the research of Maurice and Brigid. Maurice says the foundation’s support over the years has “allowed us to be more than just a brain tissue repository and really to stretch out what we can do with brain tissue”. He credits additional funding received this year with enabling the bank to secure more staff to help “maximise these incredible brains we’ve been gifted” as well as facilitating the use of techniques such as spatial transcriptomics – a powerful method of analysis that reveals what changes are happening on a cellular level in the brain tissue.

The brain bank has also been supported by the Douglas Charitable Trust, with research by Maurice and his lab into Parkinson’s disease receiving philanthropic funding from Cure Parkinson’s NZ, the Gus Fisher Charitable Trust, the Boyd Clarke Foundation, the Lough family, the Cotton family and others. Brigid’s research has been supported by the Auckland Medical Research Foundation, Kelliher Charitable Trust and others.

Maurice says without their help none of the remarkable research taking place would be possible.

“Our philanthropic funders really allow us to do the work that we can do.”