Training brain cells to stop epileptic seizures

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Ivanhoe Newswire) – More than three million Americans have epilepsy.

Not knowing when or if a crisis will occur can make life difficult. Most people can take medication to control it. But up to 30 percent of people with epilepsy do not respond to drug treatment. Now, for the first time, a new experimental cell therapy aims to eliminate seizures without drugs or invasive brain surgery.

They can strike anytime and anywhere! Now, a new epilepsy clinical trial uses a brain cell regenerative procedure to stop seizures.

“Our goal there is to achieve seizure freedom,” says Sharona Ben-Haim, MD, a neurosurgeon at UC San Diego Health.

Standard treatment for epilepsy begins with medication, then removing the parts of the brain that are causing the seizures. But there is a risk of damaging healthy brain tissue. Now, doctors at UC San Diego use MRI guidance to identify the exact area causing seizures, and then cells derived from stem cells are injected.

“This therapy gives us the opportunity to not destroy tissue, but rather rehabilitate and recover it,” says Jerry Shih, MD, neurologist and director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at UC San Diego Health.

The first patient treated was a 38-year-old man who had five to eight attacks per month. Two months after the procedure, his seizures diminished.

“He had over 95% reduction in his seizures, which is amazing,” says Dr. Shih.

Doctors hope that over time he might even stop having seizures. The very first patient to receive regenerative cell therapy in New York experienced 30 seizures per month and now, a year after treatment, he is seizure-free. Both patients are part of a national clinical trial. Patients who participate must have temporal lobe epilepsy and will be monitored regularly for two years after the procedure.