aptaTargets participates in a study with world leaders in stroke to improve enrollment in clinical trials

4 October, 2023

STAIR - Stroke Treatment Academic Industry Roundtable
The enrollment of participants in acute ischemic stroke clinical trials is the main limitation for testing new therapeutic approaches to improve patient outcomes. This is the conclusion of a study carried out by the Stroke Treatment Academic Industry Roundtable (STAIR) which featured Dr Macarena Hernández, Chief Scientific Officer of aptaTargets. The study has been published in the scientific journal Stroke of the American Heart Association (AHA).

The study, titled Enhancing Enrollment in Acute Stroke Trials: Current State and Consensus Recommendations, recommends making greater efforts to expand the medical community’s implementation of emergency consent procedures and adopting processes that are easily incorporated into the standard workflow that improve the efficiency and execution of clinical trials.

STAIR was created in 1998 to usher in new solutions to the field of acute ischemic stroke treatment after extensive clinical trials failures of promising stroke treatments. The goal was to identify the barriers that impeded successful trials and then establish multi-disciplinary, cross-cutting collaborations among public and private sector experts to share their knowledge and achieve consensus on strategies.

Since then, an invitation-only consensus conference has been held every year with 150 leaders from academia, global industry and government (the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and Food and Drug Administration) from over 30 countries.

aptaTargets was one of the biopharmaceutical companies invited to the latest 12th STAIR conference held on 21-22 March, 2023 in Washington (USA). Dr Macarena Hernández and Dr Marc Ribó, interventional neurologist at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, principal investigator of the Stroke Research Group from the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) and Chief Medical Director of aptaTargets took part in the conference on the company’s behalf.

aptaTargets is ranked in the global key companies working on new therapeutics options in acute ischemic stroke. Its lead program is ApTOLL, a first-in-class cytoprotective drug with immunomodulator and anti-inflammatory effect, that yielded ground-breaking safety and primary efficacy results in the Phase 2a clinical trial.

The prevalence of ischemic stroke has been rising since the past few years, which prompts the growing demand for the treatment options. According the World Stroke Organization (WSO) there are over 7.6 million new ischemic strokes each year. Globally, over 87% of all incident strokes are ischemic strokes.

Reference article:

Enhancing Enrollment in Acute Stroke Trials: Current State and Consensus Recommendations

Broderick J, Sampaio Silva G, Selim M, Kasner S, Aziz Y, Sutherland J, Jauch E, Adeoye O, Hill M, Mistry E, Lyden P, Mocco J, Smith E, Hernández-Jiménez M, Deljkich E, Kamel H, on behalf of the STAIR XII participants. Stroke, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1161/STROKEAHA.123.044149