I joined CUH in 2021 as a consultant neuropathologist. From very early on in medical school I was fascinated by the brain and dementia disorders. I actually trained as a neurologist first before I discovered my passion for neuropathology. As neuropathologists we are responsible for making a diagnosis on the brain tissue coming from a patient with a neurological disease, by examining the tissue under the microscope. In the hospital I split my time between the samples coming from neurosurgeries and the work in the Cambridge Brain Bank. I also work as a researcher in the university studying dementia disorders.
A lot of what we know about how the brain works in health and disease comes from studies in laboratory animals such as mice and we have learnt a great deal so far. However, we have also come to realise that understanding diseases in people is way more complex and challenging and that a drug that works in a mouse does not necessarily work in people. As a result, there has been a clear surge in demand to use human brain tissue samples in research. Brain Banks like the one we have at CUH are crucial to support this work.
In the Cambridge Brain Bank we receive around 40 brains a year from patients who have had a neurological disease, mostly from people with neurodegenerative disorders. As a neuropathologist one of our roles is to make a diagnosis on the brain from the deceased patient – many diseases can only be diagnosed with certainty under the microscope. In addition I also liaise with research groups across the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and beyond to coordinate the tissue sampling for various research projects.
We are hugely grateful to the patients and their families who donate their brains after their death.
Annelies
It is thanks to their gift and support for research that further progress into the understanding and treatment of these devastating diseases can be made. I am particularly excited about how new technologies that were developed in laboratory animals and that enable us to investigate tissue at the level of single cells, can now also be applied to human tissue. Advances in science are happening quickly and I am confident that these will one day make a real difference to patients.