Bacterial meningitis is a devastating infectious disease of the brain that causes persistent neurofunctional deficits including cerebral palsy, hearing loss, and impairment of learning and memory in up to half of the surviving children. Brain injury to the cortical hemispheres and the hippocampus has been identified as histomorphologic correlate of neurological sequelae. Using disease models that exhibit important forms of brain injury found in the human disease, gene expression profiling in acute, i.e. 6 h and late disease, i.e. 30 h after initiation of antibiotic therapy, pointed towards mechanisms of brain injury and regeneration that were evaluated for their functional relevance and therapeutic potential.