Biorepository Now Available Globally

The Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital (The Neuro) https://mcgill.ca/neuro, is launching the Clinical Biospecimen Imaging and Genetic (C-BIG) Repository one of the world’s largest highly curated biorepositories of neurological disorders in the world, as an open access resource for the global scientific community.

“There is an urgency for our patients since there have been no major breakthroughs in treating neurological diseases for many years. We are eager to share the C-BIG Repository resources and tools with the global research community in particular with teams and countries that don’t have access to these technologies and can’t currently generate these tools and data themselves,” reports, Dr. Guy Rouleau, Director, The Neuro, and Co-Founder of the Tanenbaum Open Science Institute. 

The C-BIG Repository includes biological samples, clinical imaging, and genetics data from 3,000 de-identified participants. This will enable the global biomedical community to better investigate the biology of neurological diseases and disorders to help accelerate the development of effective treatments.

“We are excited to open the C-BIG Repository to the world because it gives researchers and clinicians access to entirely new and unique tools to study neurological diseases,” says Dr. Jason Karamchandani, Scientific Director of the C-BIG Repository.

The largest collections currently being made available includes people with Parkinson’s disease, ALS, neuromuscular diseases, with growing collections in MS, autism and frontotemporal lobar dementia.

“The Neuro’s Open Early Drug Discovery Unit is leveraging breakthroughs in both stem cell technology and CRISPR gene-editing technology to transform tissue samples into disease specific cell lines”, reports Dr. Karamchandani.

 

Go to https://www.mcgill.ca/neuro/open-science/c-big-repository for more information.