Doctors treat epilepsy with anticonvulsants to control seizures, but some patients do not respond to these first-line therapies. For patients with drug-refractory epilepsy (DRE), whose seizures persist after treatment with two or more anticonvulsants, clinicians must surgically remove part of the brain tissue to cure the disease.
When first-line medicines fall short, scientists examine the molecular mechanisms of a disease to understand why and to develop alternatives. At Duke-NUS Medical School and KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, clinicians and researchers teamed up to investigate how inappropriate proinflammatory mechanisms contribute to DRE pathogenesis. This work builds on evidence from animal models and resected brains of human patients that associated inflammation with epilepsy.2-4 Derrick Chan, a clinician scientist at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital believes this research is an extension of his clinical work. “[T]his direction became really important, because we were looking for a less invasive way to try to help ...
