Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The Associated Press - Wednesday, December 16, 1998
"To the outside world it may sound a little ghoulish," said Dr. Susan Morgello, the project's principal investigator. "This provides a really needed basic resource for research."
A grant from the National Institutes of Health, announced Tuesday, will be used to set up the Manhattan HIV Brain Bank, operated by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Beth Israel Medical Center and St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. Doctors will identify patients in the final stages of AIDS and recruit them to undergo neurological and psychiatric testing and donate their brains to the bank when they die, Morgello said. The program hopes to recruit about 90 patients annually, beginning next year.
Medical researchers from around the country will be able to apply to use the brain tissue for study, she said.
Among the questions researchers expect to tackle are whether the AIDS virus can hide in patients' brains or nervous systems when it is undetectable in blood tests and what impact, if any, new drug therapies have on the brain.
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