A multisite preclinical study brings rigor to stroke research. Is the model generalizable?

Stroke may be a contender for the biggest disconnect between the unmet need and the amount of drug development activity being done to fill that need. The barriers to conducting stroke research are high, and industry has had little appetite in recent years, yet Keck Professor Patrick Lyden believes there would be enthusiasm for developing stroke therapies if the preclinical pipeline held higher-quality candidates.

After having a hand in the success of standard-of-care thrombolytic agent tPA in the 1990s, Lyden, a professor of physiology and neuroscience and neurology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, has run many stroke trials and seen many failures. For the past five years, he’s been working with NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and several academic labs to devise a solution to one of the field’s pain points: the inability to reproduce seemingly promising animal findings...