This is mainly through review of your submitted curriculum vita and/or the submitted curriculum vita of the principal investigator for the planned studies. There should be evidence of capability with methods of tissue analysis, through the listed publications and your affiliation with accredited institutions.

These are primarily to show our funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health that we have been supporting projects that are receiving funding from the same agency. This is important for documentation of our productivity.

Often a tissue request is submitted by a junior-level scientist or technician that is working for or with another scientist who is the actual principal investigator. If the junior person’s credentials are not yet sufficient to qualify them as a tissue requester, we may yet allow this if the principal investigator has sufficient credentials. Also, the principal investigator’s grants may be assisted with the tissue studies and this is important documentation of our productivity.

This is required in order for our legal personnel to work out a Materials Transfer Agreement with your legal personnel.

Your information will not be shared with any commercial entities or other tissue requesters. Your information may be shared with granting agencies, so that we may document our productivity.

As the volume of tissue requests is high and we have limited personnel available to handle tissue requests, we ask that you make your initial request through the website. After your request is received, we will contact you by email to obtain more details on your request and match your scientific objective with appropriate tissue from our inventory.

For pilot studies, we will generally be able to ship your tissue to you within 4 weeks. For larger studies that involve a cost recovery charge, we must arrange for a Materials Transfer Agreement to be signed between our institutions. This often takes up to two or three months, depending on the capabilities and concerns of the legal personnel.

We first assess the scientific credentials of the tissue requester and/or the principal investigator of the planned tissue studies. Then we assess the scientific merit of the project. Then we assess whether or not we have the tissue inventory to meet the project needs. Then we assess, if the tissue requested is in very limited supply (such as frozen hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, striatum, substantia nigra), whether the proposed study represents optimum usage of the tissue. We may suggest alternate tissue sites for the planned studies if there is no demonstrated and compelling scientific need to use one of the smaller, vital regions such as those listed.

These regions are very small and in very high demand. Therefore, to maximize the number of projects that may be served, we only give out between 5 and 10 cryostat sections of these areas per subject for any single project. These can be sent on dry ice, mounted on glass slides or curled into microcentrifuge tubes. To optimize the scientific impact of the studies using such small vital regions, we need to see a compelling scientific reason why other, more voluminous brain regions with the characteristic pathology, such as cerebral cortex, could not be used instead. Even if the planned study has a compelling rationale, we may ask that the investigators pilot the methods first in cerebral or cerebellar cortex.