Editorial: Cell-based Therapies for Stroke: Promising Solution or Dead End?

You can't recognize that this will be a dead end? There is NO STROKE LEADERSHIP TO TAKE A STROKE STRATEGY TO TO GET IT EXECUTED. Open your eyes just a little, maybe talk to some stroke survivors.

Editorial: Cell-based Therapies for Stroke: Promising Solution or Dead End?

Johannes Boltze¹, Koji Abe², Andrew N. Clarkson³, Oliver Detante^4,5, Pedro M. Pimentel-Coelho^6,7, Paulo H. Rosado-de-Castro^8,9,10 and Miroslaw Janowski^11,12*

• ¹School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
• ²Department of Neurology, Graduate School of Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan
• ³Department of Anatomy, Brain Health Research Centre and Brain Research New Zealand, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
• ⁴Stroke Unit, Neurology Department, Grenoble Hospital, Grenoble, France
• ⁵Grenoble Institute of Neurosciences, Inserm U1216, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France
• ⁶Instituto de Biofísica Carlos Chagas Filho, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• ⁷Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia em Medicina Regenerativa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• ⁸Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• ⁹Department of Radiology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• ¹⁰D'Or Institute for Research and Education, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• ¹¹Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States
• ¹²NeuroRepair Department, Mossakowski Medical Research Centre, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland

Editorial on the Research Topic
Cell-based Therapies for Stroke: Promising Solution or Dead End?

The introduction of recanalization procedures has revolutionized acute stroke management, although factors such as the narrow time window, strict eligibility criteria, and logistical limitations still exclude the majority of patients from treatment. In addition, residual deficits are present in many patients who undergo therapy, preventing their return to premorbid status. Hence, there is a strong need for novel, and ideally complementary, approaches to stroke management.

In preclinical experiments, cell-based treatments have demonstrated beneficial effects in the subacute and chronic stages following stroke (1–3) and therefore are considered a promising option to supplement current clinical practice. At the same time, great progress has been made in developing clinically feasible delivery and monitoring protocols (4). However, efficacy results initially reported in clinical studies fell short of expectations (5) raising concerns that cell treatment might eventually share the “dead end fate” of many previous experimental stroke therapies. This Research Topic reviews some of the latest and most innovative studies to summarize the state of the art in translational cell treatments for stroke.