Page 20 - Memora anual Fundación CIEN 2017

INTERVIEW

10th Anniversary Queen Sofia Foundation Alzheimer Center

Alberto Rábano, Director of the CIEN Foundation Tissue
Bank

How and in what year does Alberto Rábano arrive at the Alz-
heimer Center?

I had the opportunity and luck to work with the original group that helped
to design the Alzheimer Project Research Unit (UIPA). Several specialists from
different fields related to Alzheimer's, clinicians, epidemiologists, basic researchers, neuropathologists,
among others, were summoned from the ISCIII to implement this idea. Pablo Martínez, a neurologist affilia-
ted to the National Epidemiology Center, was in charge of coordinating this working group. My role in that
group was related to my previous work at the brain bank in Madrid, the Tissue Bank for Neurological Rese-
arch.

When we started working on the proposed Alzheimer Project, I believe around 2004, I was working at the
Alcorcon Hospital Foundation, where we have developed since 1998 a good part of the work of the brain
bank. The Neuropathology Unit that I was managing at the hospital at the time had been since 2001 a na-
tional reference center for the neuropathological diagnosis of prion diseases. It was a very interesting pe-
riod in which we all were outlining the characteristics of the Center, its activity, structure, endowment,
human resources, etc. This is how the future Department of Neuropathology, with its own facilities, was de-
fined in the Center.

From the beginning, my role was responsible for the line of work of Neuropathology. According to the ori-
ginal development of the Center, the UIPA would have as a main task the multidisciplinary study of institu-
tionalized patients at the Alzheimer Center of Vallecas. Thus, our original mission was to make it possible for
the patients of the Center to donate their post mortem brain to the tissue bank, and to perform the ex-
traction and processing of the tissue right there. Consequently, the initial endowment of the Department al-
ready allowed to manage a small bank of brains, from the obtaining of the tissue, to the transfer of samples
to the investigators who requested them.

As of November 2009, I joined the UIPA full time, and I also incorporated the main activity that we had been
doing in the hospital as a Neurological Tissue Bank, except, of course, related to prion diseases, which re-
quires special biosafety facilities. Thus, in 2010 the CIEN Tissue Bank (BT-CIEN) was inaugurated in the Cen-
ter, which since then incorporates an internal donation program, aimed at residents of the Alzheimer Center
of Vallecas, and an external program, aimed at the general population. , which is fundamentally the one
that was developed in the hospital.

The consequence for the biobank activity is that the annual number of tissue extractions has almost tripled
compared to the previous activity, and that step by step a series of brains donated by patients of the resi-
dence has been generated, with abundant data and associated samples for many years, which is unique
in Spain, and which can be compared with very few series in the world.

CIEN Foundation Annual Report 2017 / 20