Colin Derdeyn, MD, Launching the first-ever platform trial for acute ischemic stroke for patients

Colin Derdeyn, MD, Professor and Chair, Department of Radiology and Medical Imaging
Transcript:
Mostly what I'm involved in is large-scale clinical trials for stroke. These procedures that we do for thrombectomy, removing a clot from the brain. We have people that wake up on the table coming in, unable to speak or move, that regain those functions as soon as the blood vessels open. And the research that we've done in these trials has made that happen.
My name is Collin Derdeyn, and I'm an interventional neuroradiologist. And what I do, I'm essentially a plumber. I navigate wires and tubes through the blood vessels up into the head using X-ray guidance, and we use those to either open up a blockage, like an acute stroke, to restore blood flow to the brain, or to plug something up like an aneurysm and prevent it from bleeding again.
We are just now launching the first-ever platform trial for acute ischemic stroke for patients that come in with a blockage of a large artery in the brain. This trial will be what's called a platform trial, where we can randomize patients into multiple arms at the same time. So the same patient may get a different neuroprotective agent on their way to thrombectomy, may get general anesthesia or not, may get a carotid stent or not, may get any number of different questions.
And doing this on a platform allows us to answer all of these questions much more efficiently, quicker, and get answers that are going to directly impact how patients do a stroke.