Advances in stroke: translational medicine 2012

Translational stroke research moves ahead in spite of a few more failures of clinical trials in 2012. Several factors are thought to contribute to explain the failure in translating experimental studies in stroke to the clinics, e.g. experimental stroke models might be too different to human stroke, there might be biases in some experimental findings, and the pathophysiology of acute brain damage caused by stroke might be different in humans and animals. The current criticism is forcing to improve the quality of experimental studies and to increase the requisites and filters that any molecule has to overcome before going into clinical research. In this short overview we will describe some translational stroke research that has taken place in 2012.