RECETOX Seminar: Martin Toul (RECETOX, CZ)

With 18 million deaths every year, cardiovascular diseases are the leading causes of mortality and disability worldwide. The current treatment often relies on the use of thrombolytic drugs that can save patients’ lives but in many cases, such treatment is not efficient enough. In order to fix the alarming statistics, the development of a new treatment is critical. The talk will provide an insight into the different treatment strategies with the focus on the improvement of current thrombolytics using protein engineering. Various aspects and factors, which need to be considered and which cause life-threatening side effects, will be discussed, and the way to suppress them will be shown. At the same time, different stages of testing of improved thrombolytics will be presented to illustrate the high level of complexity and cooperation during the development process. The presented consortium Stroke Brno unites several teams across different Brno institutions with the aim to develop a new thrombolytic drug that will be effective and will save many human lives all over the world.