Welcome back! Now that you're tanned, rested and ready again, let's just confront the fact that we've barely scratched the surface. This syllabus was designed as an introduction, and as such we've tried to keep it simple, with broad brushstrokes and generalizations--generalizations that work well sometimes for thinking about the disease and teaching about the disease, but don't always hold up in the particulars. And while I really do think that the Four Horsemen concept is a useful conceptual framework, I have to confess that it leaves out a lot of things we haven't talked about, like the role of zinc, phosphorylation of CREB, Ca2+-dependent endonucleases, IRE-1, protein aggregates…you name it.

Syllabi are supposed to be organized, simple and accessible. Real life, on the other hand, is messy. And that goes doubly for brain ischemia.

And yet…right now, at this moment, you, fresh from first 2/3 of this syllabus and your cappucino and biscotti and foot rub…you could sit down right now and design a candidate therapy for brain ischemia.

And that's because you know what the targets are.