Coordination of and participation in clinical stroke trials is a key mission of our group. Activities in this area focus on the rapid transfer of innovative imaging methods and treatment approaches into clinical trials and routine clinical practice. This involves observational studies as well as coordination of multicenter randomized trials. In running clinical trials we cooperate with national and international networks of stroke researchers.

We have planned and coordinated the FP7-funded investigator-initiated European multicenter randomized controlled trial of MRI-based thrombolysis in stroke patients with unknown time of symptom onset (WAKE-UP) (Thomalla et al., 2018). Together with partners in Heidelberg, we are coordinating the investigator-initiated randomized TENSION trial of thrombectomy in stroke patients with extended stroke lesions and patients presenting in a late time window, who are currently excluded from available effective treatment approaches (Bendszus et al., 2019), which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (https://tension-study.com/). Together with other partners from Germany, we have initiated a large multicenter prospective registry of thrombectomy in clinical practice, the German Stroke registry – Endovascular Treatment (GSR-ET) (Alegiani et al., 2019) (http://www.german-stroke-registry.de/).