In what could one day become a new treatment for epilepsy, researchers at UC San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley have used pulses of light to prevent seizure-like activity in neurons. The researchers used brain tissue that had been removed from epilepsy patients as part of their treatment. Eventually, they hope the technique will replace surgery to remove the brain tissue where seizures originate, providing a less invasive option for patients whose symptoms cannot be controlled with medication.
The team used a method known as optogenetics, which employs a harmless virus to deliver light-sensitive genes from microorganisms to a particular set of neurons in the brain that can be switched on and off with pulses of light. It is the first demonstration that optogenetics can be used to control seizure activity in living human brain tissue, and it opens the door to new treatments for other neurological diseases and conditions. "This represents a giant step toward a powerful new way of treating epilepsy and likely other conditions," said Tomasz Nowakowski, PhD, an assistant professor of neurological surgery and a co-senior author of the study, which appears Nov.
15 in Nature Neuroscience . Subduing epilepsy's spikes To keep the tissue alive long enough to complete the study, which took several weeks, the researchers created an environment that mimics conditions inside the skull. John Andrews, MD, a resident in neurosurgery, placed the tissue on a nutrient medium that resembl.