Most patients with ischaemic stroke never receive timely reperfusion therapy, and the window in which brain tissue can be salvaged closes long before many reach a suitable hospital. Researchers in the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy in the LKS Faculty of Medicine at HKU, with the InnoHK Advanced Biomedical Instrumentation Centre, have developed a prehospital option intended to be administered in that interval.
The delivery platform is the innovation. A nasal spray of micron-sized powder breaks down into nanoparticles once inside the nose, which then carry drugs along the nose-to-brain route and so bypass the blood-brain barrier. That barrier is the reason more than 90 per cent of central nervous system drug candidates fail in clinical trials, according to figures cited with the work, and circumventing it opens a pathway for compounds that would otherwise never reach their target.
In preclinical animal studies, administration within 30 minutes of stroke onset reduced ischaemic infarction by more than 80 per cent. The platform took over a decade to develop and received the Special Grand Prize of the Chinese Delegation together with a gold medal at the 51st International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva. Ischaemic stroke is the second leading cause of death and disability worldwide, with an annual global burden cited at above 890 billion US dollars.
The work remains at animal and cell-experiment stage, with toxicology studies and clinical trials planned, so no therapeutic claim is established. The strategic appeal lies in the setting rather than the molecule: a treatment that could be given in an ambulance, or conceivably earlier, addresses the part of the stroke care pathway that hospital-based innovation cannot reach.