Before these life-saving drugs—which consist of a combination of the clot dissolving alteplase and tenecteplase—can be administered however, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) must be performed to distinguish ischemic from hemorrhagic stroke. This delays treatment and reduces the chances of recovery. A new animal model study circumvents this time-consuming need for neuroimaging before treatment can be administered in stroke patients, by designing a synthetic peptide that targets a common and critical component in both ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes. The study is reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine, in an article titled “An MD2-perturbing peptide has therapeutic effects in rodent and rhesus monkey models of stroke” and is led by senior investigators Xunming Ji, PhD, at the Capital Medical University in Beijing, and Hailong Dong, PhD, and Lize Xiong, PhD, at the Fourth Military Medical University in Shaanxi, China.
Synthetic Peptide Found Effective in Ischemic and Hemorrhagic Stroke (genengnews.com)
