Stroke patients who intravenously received the novel neuroprotective medication loberamisal (NeuroDawn Pharmaceutical) on a daily basis—for 10 days and starting within 48 hours of stroke symptom onset—experienced a better recovery than patients who received a placebo in a clinical trial presented for the first time at the International Stroke Conference (ISC; 4–6 February 2026, New Orleans, USA) earlier today.
“Neuroprotective agents may help improve patient outcomes since they are aimed at preserving the function of neurovascular units. However, trials for most of these agents have not been successful,” said study author Shuya Li (Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Beijing, China), who shared these preliminary late-breaking data at ISC 2026. “In this trial, we tested loberamisal—a small-molecule, dual-acting neuroprotective agent that was an effective neuroprotectant in rodent studies. New treatments for stroke may come from multi-target neuroprotective agents, which could lead to important advancements in reducing or preventing disability after a stroke.”
In the present clinical study—a phase-three, large-scale randomised controlled trial conducted at 32 centres across China—998 adult stroke patients were treated for 10 days with either a daily, intravenous infusion of 40mg of loberamisal or a matched placebo started within 48 hours of a moderate-to-severe ischaemic stroke (National Institutes of Health stroke scale [NIHSS] 7–20). The researchers relay that roughly 17% of participants received a standard intravenous clot-busting medication like alteplase, which limited their ability to assess the combined effect of both treatments. Patients who received a mechanical thrombectomy to treat their stroke were excluded from the trial.
At 90 days after treatment, the analysis found that 69% of participants who received loberamisal experienced an excellent functional recovery (modified Rankin scale [mRS] 0–1) compared to 56% in the placebo group. Additionally, loberamisal appeared to be a safe treatment owing to the fact that patients who received the drug did not demonstrate an increased risk of serious side-effects or death compared to those in the placebo group.
The trial being conducted solely in China is acknowledged by the researchers as a key study limitation, as this consideration means its results cannot be directly translated to people living in other countries.
“We want to confirm our findings with larger groups of people, including people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, patients with more severe strokes, and those who also have had vascular surgery,” Li commented. “We need to better understand how loberamisal works by studying biomarkers in multiple population groups.”
Other notable limitations include the fact that most patients in the study had moderate-to-severe strokes, which may mitigate its applicability to people with more severe strokes, and the lack of assessment of blood or imaging biomarkers—which leaves room for improvement in the present understanding of how loberamisal affects the body.
In conversation with NeuroNews, ISC chair Lauren Sansing (Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, USA) said these “really exciting” new data may “rejuvenate the field” and described them as one of the first “big wins” for neuroprotection in a large clinical trial, also positing that the study’s 48-hour time window could translate into a “huge” potential pool of stroke patients who would stand to benefit from the drug.
Sansing went on to highlight the fact that the approach of hitting more than one target with a single drug has demonstrated promising early signals, and concluded that—owing to this study and many other ongoing research efforts—the current outlook for the future of neuroprotective treatments in stroke is “better than ever”.
