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Three-year MRC-funded project to develop new drugs to treat childhood epilepsy
Scientists at Aston University have started work on a project that will look for new drug treatments to prevent the onset of childhood epilepsy. The three-year project, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), is a collaboration led by researchers from Aston University's College of Health and Life Sciences in partnership with Bristol University and Jazz Pharmaceuticals. They were awarded £2 million to study how epilepsy takes hold in the brain and how this process could be prevented. Researchers will test new drugs in the human brain using living tissue samples...
Three-year MRC-funded project to develop new drugs to treat childhood epilepsy
Scientists at Aston University have started work on a project that will look for new drug treatments to prevent the onset of childhood epilepsy.
The three-year project, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), is a collaboration led by researchers from Aston University's College of Health and Life Sciences in partnership with Bristol University and Jazz Pharmaceuticals. They were awarded £2 million to study how epilepsy takes hold in the brain and how this process could be prevented.
Researchers will test new drugs in the human brain using live tissue samples from children with difficult-to-treat epilepsy who underwent brain surgery.
Epilepsy is a brain disorder characterized by seizures. As Professor Gavin Woodhall, lead researcher and co-director of the Aston Institute of Health and Neurodevelopment, explains:
"Seizures are periods of time when networks of brain cells are too active and uncontrollably aroused and spike. When the uncontrolled arousal spreads to brain regions that control movement, then too many brain cells are talking at once and we can see seizures as changes in movement such as twitches and jerks."
After receiving the grant, Professor Woodhall said: "We will be able to study epilepsy in such detail that we hope to be able to treat the problems that underlie epilepsy, rather than just the seizures themselves. And this could help pave the way to preventing epilepsy from developing in children at all.
"Essentially, we want to find a treatment that stops the brain from detecting epilepsy after the first seizure - through a new drug treatment. We will test a known drug and a new drug to see if the drug can do this."
As part of the research for this project, scientists will examine how different amounts of epileptic activity in the brain can alter brain excitability. The researchers predict that when there are many seizures, synapses in the brain decrease their activity and brain cells are more likely to spike.
For this reason, we will test antiepileptic drugs and new drugs designed to disrupt homeostatic scaling – a form of plasticity in which the brain responds to chronically increased activity in a neural circuit with negative feedback, allowing individual neurons to reduce their overall action potential firing rate.
By interfering with homeostatic scaling, we can see if they can prevent seizures from developing or reduce their intensity.”
Professor Gavin Woodhall, senior researcher and co-director of the Aston Institute of Health and Neurodevelopment
The research will allow Professor Woodhall and his team to record the life history of the disease. This is something that has never been done before in this level of detail and is predicted to help shed light on how epilepsy initially develops in the brain.
Following the three-year project, the team will move into drug development and then clinical testing.
Source:
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