people affected by brain-aging diseases, we’ve yet to develop a national brain bank, or even guidelines for national brain banking. Molecular Medicine Ireland (MMI) a consortium of scientists, are keen for us to harmonize guidelines for collecting clinical specimens to develop best practices for tissue storage. In fact, they have published “MMI Guidelines for Standardized Biobanking” on their website. Moreover, MMI are promoting banking of genes in Ireland, and said they would “be happy to receive guidelines for brain tissue banking.”
The advantages of living on an island
If you go abroad you’ll find that most strangers assume all Irish people know each other. And because we live on such a small island, and are a very chatty people, it’s fair to assume we’re all only a few degrees of separation away. More often than not, you’ll find you know a stranger’s cousin’s bridesmaid’s uncles…. It’s a huge leap to take our relative familiarity with each other to suggest that we are all family and related. However, thanks to the fact that famines and poverty rendered Ireland pretty unattractive to world migrants for many hundreds of years, we have a pretty homogenous population. The relative lack of ethnic mixing until recent years is actually a boon to geneticists because it gives them a huge population to use. Simply stated, they can compare Irish people of a similar genetic background to each other, and, for example figure out why some families more likely to get cancer than others.
The “GeneLibrary project” is an ambitious proposal to utilize our natural population resource for such health and lifestyle based studies. Essentially, the “GeneLibrary project”, proposed by MMI aims to bio-bank 10,000 DNA and blood samples from healthy volunteers from Ireland and Northern Ireland, and use this bank as a resource to study genes involved in diseases. By coupling this GeneLibrary, to a brain-banking facility we could set up a research facility to rival any in the world. For example it could be possible to link genes in people’s blood with brain changes at early stages of diseases and predict who may be at risk of developing dementia in old age. Unfortunately, despite our readily available population, because of budgetary cuts, it looks like the GeneLibrary project won’t be funded in the near future. This is unfortunate because currently 200 organisations in 24 EU member countries are jointly planning an EU infrastructure to manage the estimated 10 million biological samples currently stored for research in the EU and it would be a shame if we were left out. However, even though it did not receive funding from the HRB, MMI still hope to establish a world-class all-island biomedical research infrastructure in the future.
Neuro-economics- from brains to bucks
Building a GeneLibrary
Genetic studies of populations are really just games of spotthe-difference on a huge level. Imagine if you had to compare every book in the library with another one and then explain how they were different. You wouldn’t know where to begin. Now imagine you only had two books, by the same author to compare to each other. Say a James Patterson, Enid Blyton or Agatha Christie book. Essentially the authors write the same book over and over, with slight differences in main characters. You’d find it much easier to tell somebody how the stories were similar or different. Genetic studies are the same. It’s much easier to spot which genes are different between a person with a disease, and a person without, if their genes are mostly similar That’s why scientists prefer studies involving twins. But if you have a population of thousands of people who have a relatively similar family history, you can create an incredibly useful resource to find genes associated with specific diseases. Naturally if you know which genes increase the risk of the diseases, it’s easier to identify people at risk, and also start developing treatments.
Compared to the US, where funding obtained from private industry, government and non-profits was estimated by the Journal of the American Medical Association to be worth about $100 billion dollars, our r