Just before we closed the book on 2025, we received some very exciting news: our colleagues Marco Hefti and Kimberly Fiock were successful in their application for the University of Iowa to join the NIH NeuroBioBank Network, winning a competitive $1.4 million per year renewable grant. This represents a significant boost for brain banking at the University of Iowa, as the only Midwest-based bank in the network, tissue from the UI bank will be available across the NIH network.
Neuroscience at Iowa has benefited from Marco’s leadership in his own lab and as one of the original faculty directors for the Iowa NeuroBank Core, created with funds from the transformational $45 million gift from the Roy J. Carver Trust.
In 2023, brain banking at the University of Iowa expanded into a full-service core facility (the Iowa Neuropathology Resource Laboratory) directed by Kimberly Fiock under the Iowa NeuroBank Core umbrella. This established our position as one of the top institutional brain banks in the country and led to this significant NIH award. This would also not have been possible without the generous support and collaboration of the Iowa Donor Network, the Iowa Office of the State Medical Examiner, and the Johnson County Medical Examiner and their teams.
Another key factor was the investment from the Carver Trust in our Research Programs of Excellence. From 2022-25, Marco collaborated with Georgina Aldridge and Catherine Marcinkiewcz on the SMASH Dementia RPOE, investigating sleep, mood and arousal in Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy Body Dementia. Because of the team’s creative research plans, Marco began banking the entire brainstem, systematically cutting at set external landmarks to allow reproducible tissue sections to be examined. This RPOE also produced the pilot data for Georgina’s NIH R01, which in turn provided salary support for the brain bank. With this momentum, Marco and Kimberly pursued the NIH NeuroBioBank funding to allow the continuation and expansion of the brain bank after the RPOE funding ended.
This type of collaboration is at the heart of everything we do in the Iowa Neuroscience Institute, and I am proud to see this team’s efforts return such positive results for our neuroscience community.
With the NIH NeuroBioBank and the NeuroBank Core’s cutting-edge spatial multi-omics capabilities, Iowa Neuroscience is leading the way in brain tissue analysis capacity and creating a repository of samples and data from a rural population that has been under-studied to date.
Core facilities are an invaluable resource for all of us in our work to advance knowledge of the brain and nervous system. We are fortunate to collaborate with Marco, Kimberly and INI Cores Director Shane Heiney and their scientific staffs to access tools and resources that are not practical for individual labs to maintain.
Ted
March 2026