Researchers use wide range of tools to understand causes of epilepsy

Epilepsy is a common condition that affects one in 26 people at some point in their lives. While many children receive effective treatment, some still suffer from poorly controlled seizures that can affect their development. Timely treatment is crucial, but physicians and researchers still have a limited understanding of the precise causes of epilepsy.

In a 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they used microelectrode arrays placed inside the brain in combination with another type of brain activity monitoring called electrocorticography, or ECoG. This allowed them to see more precise patterns of activity by collecting nerve cell activity data directly from the brain surface of human study subjects.

That study showed how the activity of the relatively few brain cells that trigger a seizure relate to the broader signals captured by the ECoG readings from the surface.Douglas Nordli Jr., MD, chief of pediatric neurology at UChicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital, Julia Henry, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics, and students in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Pritzker School of Medicine on a project to help monitor premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit and detect seizures. Naoum Issa, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurology, Shasha Wu, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurology, and Somin Lee, another student in van Drongelen’s lab, are also studying ways to use non-invasive monitoring on the scalp to detect seizures that originate from deep within the brain, which can help make an earlier diagnosis before they spread to rest of the brain.

These clinical applications complement Tryba’s basic research in the lab. He has been working with sections of brain tissue that have been removed from patients during epilepsy surgery to understand how seizures propagate through brain cells, and the mechanisms for slowing them down. The lab is also experimenting with brain organoids, small clusters of neurons grown from stem cells that can simulate living brain tissue.

“The advantage of using our interdisciplinary research, combining complementary techniques in neurobiology, mathematics, computer science with clinical data, is the wide range of tools that are available to test hypotheses,” van Drongelen said. “With this approach, we hope to further our insight into what makes brain circuits go awry during seizures and ultimately how to fix this.”