A promising new treatment for epilepsy directly targets the nerve cells, deep within the brain, that cause seizures. The treatment uses an electronic micropump and an anticonvulsant drug to inhibit the relevant areas of the brain without affecting healthy brain regions. It has had promising initial results on mice in vitro and will now be tested on live animals.

Very few epilepsy drugs successfully make it to clinical practice. Many result in harmful (or potentially harmful) side effects while others are rendered ineffectual by the body's natural defenses, which prevent the drugs from reaching their intended destination. Yet 30 percent of the approximately 50 million epilepsy sufferers around the world are resistant to all existing treatments.

Researchers at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience, École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, and Linköping University sought to combat this problem by devising a treatment that could control epilepsy without affecting healthy brain regions. Their solution involves a micropump 20 times thinner than a hair.

hi-news.ru