Dr. Gary Steinberg

Different pharmacologic agents were tried.

probably a thousand different drugs were tried, which blocked the pathway leading to cell death.

So interestingly, when you deprive the brain and the neurons of oxygen and glucose, they don't die immediately.

And it takes some time.

And it's actually an active process.

So the release of...

these excitatory amino acids occurs.

So normally, as you know, glutamate, aspartate are important neurotransmitters in the brain and you need them to function.

But after a stroke, when there's a deprivation of oxygen and glucose and a mismatch between the metabolism and the supply of oxygen and glucose,

For some reason, there's a release of these excitatory amino acids like glutamate, and that causes an influx of calcium into the neurons, which is the final common pathway to dying.

And then there are other pathways that can then lead to release of free radicals, which are more damaging.

And those can cause another type of cell death called apoptotic cell death.

That's a cell death that occurs and requires protein synthesis.

And then with reperfusion, say the artery opens up, then you've got a lot of inflammation.

So these pharmacological treatments, as I say, a thousand of them were tried.

And they were found to be very effective in preclinical stroke models.

So we could cure stroke in the lab.

My lab studied this for probably 15 years.

And there was no doubt we could cure stroke if we got the drugs on board even after the stroke within a few hours.

But it never was able to be translated to the clinical arena except for one case.