Why sex matters in mouse models
On October 26, 2006, at the opening day of the Joint World Congress for Stroke in Cape Town, South Africa, disappointing news spread quickly among the attendees: The second Phase III clinical trial for NXY-059 had failed. The drug, a free-radical spin trap agent for ischemic stroke, had been eagerly anticipated as a successful neuroprotective agent for stroke patients. As the drug developer, AstraZeneca, issued a press release reporting the news, e-mails circulated quickly within the stroke research community, many with the subject line, "Have you heard the bad news?"
"We were optimistic that this would be the new stroke drug," says Marc Fisher, director of the stroke program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, who was at the conference in Cape Town. "We were all talking about it. There were a lot of long faces that ...
