Stroke Cytoprotection: Can Repeating History with New Expectations Really Be the Path to Success in Stroke Research?
- PDF / 233,244 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 76 Downloads / 137 Views
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Stroke Cytoprotection: Can Repeating History with New Expectations Really Be the Path to Success in Stroke Research? Paul A. Lapchak 1 & Victor V. Uteshev 2
Received: 12 February 2017 / Accepted: 16 February 2017 / Published online: 1 March 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017
Dear Editor: It appears that a key guideline directly applicable to today’s stroke research has been formulated years ago by Albert Einstein: “In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear for failure.” As stroke research scholars from around the world are calling for adjunctive cytoprotective or neuroprotective strategies to support all components of the neurovascular unit to complement the two current standard-of-care therapies being utilized in hospital settings [1–6], there remains a small percentage of skeptics in the stroke research community who are reflexively “neuroprotection-phobic” after the negative results of a few historical devastating stroke neuroprotection trials. The “cosmic” implications of the SAINT trials [7, 8] failure need to be put aside and be regarded as a learning experience; non-blood brain barrier-penetrable compounds with a single mechanism of action are clearly not optimal for stroke. The failure of NEST [9] due to futility should be dismissed as lack of knowledge by the developer on how to effectively apply the light therapy, and FAST-MAG should be looked at with a completely open mind [10], as the perfect exercise on how to develop, train, and establish a functional network to test
* Paul A. Lapchak [email protected] Victor V. Uteshev [email protected] 1
Department of Neurology & Neurosurgery, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Advanced Health Sciences Pavilion, Suite 8305, 127 S. San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048, USA
2
Institute for Healthy Aging, Center for Neurocience Discovery, CBH 501, University of North Texas Health Science Center, 3500 Camp Bowie Blvd., Ft. Worth, TX 76107, USA
future cytoprotectives within the golden-hour. If history is any guidance, we may have to accept that living in “uncertain times” is probably permanent and giving novel, risky therapeutic principles a chance is the only way to solve the stroke problem. Let us recall that the tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA) was subject to several clinical failures before significant efficacy was demonstrated. In the absence of treatments that adequately meet clinical and social demands, the research community and funding agencies should embrace all the advances in translational stroke research, many of which were published in Translational Stroke Research and STROKE journals. Times have changed dramatically and research practices must also change to reflect the increased demands! That is what stroke patients expect from us. In 2017, it is no longer acceptable or encouraged to initiate a clinical trial based upon a limited amount of preclinical data that was accumulated in a single rodent species without adequate controlled conditions. For example, this s
Data Loading...
