Minocycline, an old anti-inflammatory drug, could be a safe and cheap treatment for stroke, with no adverse effects if the dose is between 200 and 700 milligrams. According to researchers from the Medical College of Georgia and the University of Georgia the drug is easy to administer and can be given with tPA.

Minocycline “is an old drug that has been studied extensively in healthy young people,” said Dr. Susan C. Fagan, professor of pharmacy at UGA, assistant dean for the MCG program of the UGA College of Pharmacy and the study’s first author. “Now that we know it’s also safe in a predominantly older stroke population, we can look more closely to identify the dose necessary to give us the pharmacologic effect we need.”

The early-stage clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health, opens the door to a much larger clinical trial assessing the antibiotic’s efficacy. The researchers are pursuing federal funding for a 2,000-patient international trial