Proteomic investigations of acute ischemic stroke in animal models: a narrative review

Abstract

Acute ischemic stroke (AIS), a neurological injury resulting from blood clots, is the second most common cause of death worldwide. Novel therapeutics are urgently needed. Rapid developments in instrumentation and bioinformatics have resulted in increased use of mass spectrometry-based proteomics as an effective tool for the in-depth study of AIS. This review focuses on proteomics investigations of AIS in animal models. We highlight the study findings in system-wide protein abundance changes and molecular mechanisms underlying AIS with or without therapeutic intervention, as well as prestroke prognosis investigations. This review reveals that common molecular pathways related to ischemic injury and spontaneous recovery have been uncovered and part of AIS-changed proteins have been repeatedly identified, indicating the promise of proteomics in generating novel therapeutic targets and biomarker candidates. We also discuss challenges, alleviating strategies, and perspectives of mass spectrometry-based proteomics in AIS research and call for a broad application of systems-level investigations on preclinical AIS molecular mechanism elucidation, target discovery and validation, and therapeutics development.