NBB — Netherlands Brain Bank
Overview
The Netherlands Brain Bank (NBB) is an independent non-profit organisation established in 1985 at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) in Amsterdam, a research institute of KNAW. It collects postmortem brain tissue from registered donors with and without neurological and psychiatric disorders, distributing tissue alongside anonymised medical records and detailed neuropathological diagnoses to academic and industry researchers worldwide. With nearly 5,000 brain autopsies completed as of 2024, the NBB supports more than 100 scientific publications annually across three specialist programmes.
Programmes
- NBB-Psy collects brain tissue from donors with seven psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum conditions, PTSD, OCD, and ADHD, recruited through large clinically characterised research cohorts.
- NBB-MS focuses on multiple sclerosis brain tissue and runs a dedicated post-mortem MRI scanning programme to characterise white matter lesion pathology.
- The Netherlands Neurogenomics Database (NND) provides registered researchers with access to transcriptome and genomics data derived from NBB brain tissue.
Access
Researchers apply for tissue and data via the NBB website or through the e-NBB portal. All requests are subject to a material transfer agreement reviewed by the NBB ethics committee. Anonymised clinical and neuropathological records accompany each tissue request. Genomics data via the NND are available to registered researchers under separate access conditions set for each dataset.
Connections
- operatedBy: Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN hosts the NBB and provides its governance and laboratory infrastructure)
- relatedTo: Donders Institute (tissue source for neuroscience research at Dutch academic institutions)
Resources
- https://www.brainbank.nl (researcher-facing portal)
- https://www.e-nbb.org (electronic application portal)
- https://www.brainbank.nl/nnd-project/ (Netherlands Neurogenomics Database)
- https://doi.org/10.15302/HB.2025.0001 (NBB 40-year retrospective, 2025)