Editorial
Time to overcome the translational roadblock: Introducing a new open access stroke journal
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* Corresponding author: Christoph Kleinschnitz christoph.kleinschnitz@mail.uni-wuerzburg.de
1 Department of Neurology, University of Münster and Evangelisches Krankenhaus Bielefeld, Burgsteig 13, 33617 Bielefeld, Germany
2 Department of Neurology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
Experimental & Translational Stroke Medicine 2009, 1:1 doi:10.1186/2040-7378-1-1
Published: 21 October 2009First paragraph (this article has no abstract)
It is with great pleasure and enthusiasm that we take the opportunity to introduce the new open access, peer-reviewed journal Experimental & Translational Stroke Medicine published by BioMed Central. As its title suggests, the journal is intended principally to gather and disseminate new knowledge in the field of experimental stroke in order to facilitate future translation and development of new clinical stroke treatments. There are many examples in modern medicine of translational research opening new perspectives for the improved diagnosis or treatment of human diseases and enabling findings from basic bench top discoveries to be transferred into clinical applications. A good example for this approach in the field of cerebrovascular disease is diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging. Introduced in the last decade of the 20th century in experimental stroke studies, this novel diagnostic tool was rapidly and successfully translated to humans, revolutionized early diagnosis of stroke and represents now the gold standard of modern stroke imaging worldwide. Contrary to this success in stroke diagnosis, the translation of novel experimental therapies into an effective treatment for stroke patients has so far not been successful for a number of reasons, with one central problem certainly rooted in insufficient stringency of the translational process from bench to bedside. A clear goal of the journal is therefore to improve the quality of experimental stroke research and reduce translational failures from bench to bedside.