For Researchers/Tissue Request

To initiate a tissue request, please register by completing the required information pages. We will review your request and respond by email within 10 days. Registration requires a brief CV (e.g., NIH biosketch) for the requesting scientist and/or the principal investigator.

We also require a one-paragraph description of the proposed use of the tissue, including the diagnoses, tissue types and formats (fixed, frozen), numbers of cases and samples needed and any special requirements (e.g., age, gender, specific pathology). This process typically involves several email exchanges to finalize details.

To register, please visit our registration page. Once registered and approved, you may download the provided files to search our database of clinical and pathological findings

Our tissue inventory

We maintain fresh-frozen and formalin-fixed tissue samples from all major organs, with a median postmortem interval (PMI) of three hours. Inventory is available to registered requestors.

More about our tissue:

• The median age of our donors is 83 years, with 10% of cases aged 70 or younger.
• Our brain inventory includes more than 2,000 cases spanning normal controls, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, cerebrovascular disease and multiple less common neurodegenerative diseases.
• Our body inventory consists primarily of normal organs from more than 850 cases, with common conditions including pneumonia, atherosclerosis, myocardial infarction, hypertensive renal disease, fatty liver, cirrhosis and type 2 diabetes.
• We have more than 175 cancer cases, including melanoma, lymphoma and cancers of the breast, thyroid, prostate, lung, esophagus, stomach, pancreas, colon, biliary tract and kidney.
• We maintain fixed and frozen brain and body tissue from individuals who died of PCR-confirmed COVID-19.
• All cases include available medical history data, derived from annual volunteer research clinical visits to our center. These visits include standardized general medical, neurological and neuropsychological assessments, as well as private medical record reviews. All tissue undergoes pathological examination by board-certified pathologists after death. Data is available to registered requestors.

Cost recovery and user charges

Our program is not fully grant-funded and our institution requires the Brain and Body Donation Program to be self-sustaining. Therefore, we charge user fees to partially recover costs associated with:

• Recruiting and conducting annual clinical assessments of donors
• Collection of antemortem biofluids
• Performing rapid autopsies
• Pathologically characterizing tissue
• Storing and cataloging tissue
• Consulting on research design
• Searching inventory and dissecting tissue
• Completing administrative and legal review of the Materials Transfer Agreement (MTA)

The user fee or cost recovery fee is not for the tissue but for the many hours of skilled labor required to make the tissue useful.

We remain committed to sharing our tissue with as many researchers as possible. For first-time requests, we generally provide enough tissue for a pilot study at no cost—excluding tissue types with limited availability.

For subsequent or larger studies, cost-recovery charges must be negotiated. For ongoing and extensive research, we recommend including a budget line for our services in your next grant application.

All tissue transactions require a signed MTA, prepared by our legal team and payment of tissue shipping costs. Tissue is typically shipped within two weeks of MTA completion and payment.

Additional resources 

• Frequently asked questions about our brain and body donation program
• Brain and body donation registration site guide