WAKE-UP project: new treatment options for stroke

WAKE-UP was an EU-funded project aiming at providing expanded treatment options for acute stroke and improving the outcome of the patients. Stroke is a devastating disease leading to death and disability in large numbers of patients with massive social and economic impact. Approximately 10% of Europe’s population is expected to suffer from stroke once in a lifetime.

The time from onset of the symptoms to drug administration is critical and determines the treatment options. Under current guidelines, intravenous thrombolysis approach is used to treat acute ischemic stroke only if it can be ascertained that the time since the onset of symptoms is less than 4.5 hours. The WAKE-UP project, which started in 2011, has proposed new clinical practices for patients who underwent stroke while sleeping or patients who had an unknown time of onset of stroke. WAKE-UP project designed a multicentre clinical trial (Clinicaltrials.gov #NCT01525290; EudraCT #2011-005906-32) involving more than 775 patients to test the efficacy and safety of a new clinical approach: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based intravenous thrombolysis in those patients who are currently excluded from treatment.

WAKE-UP was carried out by an international consortium with the participation of over 300 clinicians from 58 centres in 7 European countries. The research groups in Medical Imaging and Cerebrovascular Pathology from IDIBGI, led by Salvador Pedraza and Joaquín Serena respectively, have actively collaborated to steer the Spanish contribution to the project. WAKE-UP has been the largest EU-funded project at IDIBGI so far, with a budget over 1 million euros and an overall budget of almost 16 million euros. The results of the project, which ended successfully in November 2017, were published in 2018 in The New England Journal of Medicine.