Montreal Neurological Institute receives $500,000 for the CIBC Fellowship in Brain Imaging

Montreal, QC – Banking institution CIBC is donating $500,000 to the Montreal Neurological Institute to create the CIBC Fellowship in Brain Imaging.

The institute is a McGill University research and teaching institute, dedicated to the study of the nervous system and neurological diseases. The fellowship will support numerous research projects at the institute over the next five years, such as its pivotal role as the only Canadian institution in the Autism Centre of Excellence, a US-based multi-institutional study looking for early indicators of autism.

In this four-year study, which began in July 2007, four medical centres in the US – University of North Carolina; Duke University; University of Washington, Seattle; and University of Pennsylvania – are scanning siblings of children diagnosed with autism and will send their raw data to the institute, one of only three centres in the world with the ability to process it. As the data-coordinating site for the project, the institute will receive all information and images about the test subjects and will be responsible for quality control and populating the database. Knowing that there is a 20% chance a sibling of a child with autism will exhibit autism, the project will map the siblings’ brains to see what changes are associated with the risk and/or development of autism.

“Training the next generation of scientists is one of our top priorities and is key to advancing science and shaping the future of patient care,” said Dr David R Colman, Director of the MNI. “Private funding to attract top-notch trainees is essential and we salute CIBC for its outstanding support.”