This discovery opens many directions for further study and could eventually lead to new therapeutic options for patients experiencing an acute stroke.

"The very rapid reaction we saw to ischemia is really important and provides clues to potential mechanisms by which MMPs may be up-regulated," explained Underly. "This is a future direction for our research--to define upstream regulators of this process that can be therapeutically targeted."


"The findings raise so many new research questions," said Shih. "For example, why do pericytes have so much MMP? What are they doing with it? What happens to pericytes days to weeks after an ischemic event? There's so much still to be understood about the acute phenomena--we're focused on that for now. In the future, we could look at later, post-injury, events to see what happens next in the life of the pericyte."

Indeed, in vivo cellular-level imaging research has a bright future.

"There's a renaissance happening with the development of new molecular tools to image and modify cell function in vivo," said Shih. "We're going to see a lot more integration between tool-makers and in vivo imaging groups in the next decade or two. There are going to be many more studies looking at the intact brain."

"It's important to fund projects like this because with in vivo imaging we're able to track exactly what happens when brain function breaks down," said Underly. "The disease state occurs in front of our eyes."

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