Preconditioning the Brain

In December 2011, the 2nd Translational Preconditioning Meeting was held at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. The motivation for this meeting arose from the success of the first meeting organized by Dr Guohua Xi and Dr Richard Keep at the University of Michigan, which took place in Ann Arbor in 2009. The main goal of the Miami meeting was to discuss and identify effective strategies to promote the basic science research of ischemic preconditioning for neurological diseases, with the ultimate objective of advancing ischemic preconditioning therapies to clinical use. With this goal in mind, the meeting was divided into clinical and basic science sessions. The discussions were organized in a question-and-answer format. More than 40 national leaders in the field attended the meeting to exchange ideas and brainstorm on ways to translate the basic science of preconditioning to clinical neurology (for a list of attendees and meeting agenda, please see online-only Supplemental Materials). The meeting took place over only 1 day and, given the early stages of development of this workshop, it was felt prudent to limit attendance to United States nationals. The organizers acknowledged this as a shortcoming of the conference that will, hopefully, be remedied in the future as the scope of the meeting expands. The purpose of this editorial is to summarize the key elements that arose out of these discussions in response to several questions posed to the attendants.The preconditioning phenomenon rests on the basic premise that organisms have developed complex and active defenses to counter adversarial conditions such as starvation and oxygen deprivation.1,2 From an evolutionary point of view, successful adaptation to environmental stress ensured survival. Triggering these innate defense systems to maintain cellular homeostasis, in the face of noxious injury, is at the root of the …