Scientists found a single dose of the protein Hi1a worked on lab rats.
They said it showed "great promise as a future stroke treatment" but had not yet been tested in human trials.
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The Stroke Association said the research was at its early stages but it would "welcome any treatment that has the potential to reduce the damage caused by stroke".
The researchers, from the University of Queensland and Monash University, travelled to Fraser Island in Australia to hunt for and capture three potentially deadly Australian funnel web spiders.
They then took the spiders back to their laboratory "for milking".
The scientists honed in on a protein in the venom and recreated a version of it in their lab.
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They then injected this Hi1a into the lab rats.
- A stroke is a brain attack that happens when the blood supply to part of the brain is cut off or there is bleeding on the brain
- Every two seconds, someone in the world will have a stroke
- Almost 17 million people who had never had a stroke before had one in 2010
- Stroke is the second most common cause of death, causing about 6.7 million deaths each year, one every five seconds
- Almost one in every eight deaths is caused by stroke
- The burden of stroke-related illness, disability and early death is set to double within the next 15 years
Source: Stroke Association
The research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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