25 Sep 15. Prof Malcolm MacLeod
Malcolm Macleod, Professor of Neurology and Translational Neurosciences discusses how his team are working to improve the development of drugs for human neurological diseases.
Transcript
"My name is Malcolm Macleod, I’m Professor of Neurology and Translational Neurosciences.
Our group are interested in how we can improve the development of drugs for human neurological diseases.
There are lots of drugs which work on the animal modules, but few which make the translation to human disease.
We’ve been looking into this and found there are a couple of reasons why this might happen – the first is that the experiments don’t always describe accurately what happens to the animal modules, and secondly sometimes it’s not possible to generalise what we see in the animal modules to human clinical trials, and so we’ve been interested in developing an evidence based approach to how one might go about that process of translation.
And one of the things that’s come out of that, is the possibility that brain cooling might be an effective treatment for human stroke, and we’ve taken that forward now and I’m now one of the investigators in a Europe wide randomised controlled trial, testing the effectiveness of brain cooling only as far as 35 degrees, in human ischemic stroke."
Relevant links