Developing new drugs is a time-consuming process with an average cost of $2.6 billion. Research funding is more readily directed toward developing new therapies for common and manageable conditions, but there is less financial incentive to pursue treatments for neuropathologies and rare diseases. As a result, treatment is available only for 5% of rare diseases and drug development programs for neurological diseases such as stroke have been abandoned by pharmaceutical industry. In this symposium, we will explore different modalities of drug discovery for rare and ignored diseases including bench to bedside, high throughput small molecule screening, and artificial intelligence.