Researchers have been able to display a minimally invasive stroke treatment which is being called a ‘remarkable technical advance’.
A research team from the Germans Tries I Pujol Institute (IGTP) have developed and established a novel, reproducible and minimally invasive stroke model in pigs through an endovascular approach.
The researchers believe that this advancement fulfils a void that has needed filling, that being the promotion of an efficient translation of innovations and new treatments “from the bench to the bedside in this field.”
This study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight as a remarkable Technical Advance, mimics the occlusion at the same cerebral artery site reported in the most widely used experimental stroke model in mice and rats, but by using pigs as the experimental model the researchers can use a brain that is far more similar to that of a humans.
The need for animal models of stroke to search for and to find new treatments in species with more human-like brain characteristics when compared to rodents, but at the same time avoiding the use of non-human primates to fulfil the EU regulations and to fit ethical concerns, is a long-pursued demand of stroke according to the study authors.
This stroke model in pigs will allow to better model and keep on studying the mechanisms operating in stroke that are also present in stroke patients, and to find stroke therapies useful to alleviate patients.
This new technique discovered by researchers on this study produces an effective occlusion of the cerebral arteries of interest, induces early focal brain damage at the desired cerebral regions 90 minutes post-occlusion that later evokes to a large cerebral infections, and produces neither mortality during the intervention nor surgical-derived discomfort.
This ischaemic stroke mode in pigs displays translational features “strikingly” common to human stroke, including damage to the white matter axonal tracts which transmit information interconnecting specific functional brain areas.
In this model, the researchers used longitudinal multimodal cerebral MR imaging similar to the one currently used in the clinical set up to assess the evolution of brain damage and cerebral blood supply.
Study lead, Dr. Teresa Gasull, says: “The reproducibility of the damage in specific brain areas in the model is important to any study that aims to determine the true neuroprotective effect of new molecules to be tested in brains similar to those of humans”.
Co-first authors of the study, Dr. Carlos Castaño and Marc Melià-Sorolla, say: “We expect this new model will foster the development of new therapeutic compounds and devices to treat patients in the years to come”.
