Pediatric Surgically Refractory Epilepsy

About Pediatric Surgically Refractory Epilepsy

Adamant seizure control in young children is necessary to avoid the development of the epileptic encephalopathy. Compared to children without disease, children with refractory epilepsy are at risk of higher rates of morbidity and death. Early intervention to control seizure frequency is also critical to reducing seizure-related morbidity and mortality. Resective and palliative surgeries continue to be the mainstay of treatment in a majority of these children. However, 20-40% patients will continue to have seizures after surgery.

mTOR is dysregulated in a number of human diseases, including tuberous sclerosis and epilepsy. A phase 1 study is currently evaluating ABI-009 in conjunction with pre-existing antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) regimen in pediatric patients with surgically-refractory epilepsy (NCT03646240).

For recent update on the trial see New Drug Trial Gives Hope for Treatment-Resistant Epilepsy

Pediatric Surgically Refractory Epilepsy

March, 7 2019, Aadi Bioscience, Inc. (Aadi), For the first time in his life, Shanahan “Shanny” Dameral, 19, has a girlfriend. Soon, he’ll be graduating with a high school diploma and looking for his first job on the Kitsap Peninsula. What seems routine for many is a big deal for Dameral and other children living with treatment-resistant or intractable epilepsy. For reasons largely unknown, seizures in this subset of children persist long past their discovery in early childhood despite being treated with multiple medications and undergoing surgery to remove the affected parts of their brain. Diagnosed with epilepsy at age 5, life for Dameral has always come with seizures attached. When his seizures returned after a second brain surgery shortly after his 16th birthday, his mom Linley Allen, hoped for a medical breakthrough. “We needed to find something else since another surgery was out of the question,” Allen said. “We had heard about a drug being studied for a more severe seizure condition. I kept holding onto hope that it might be expanded to treat Shanny’s type of seizures because it was all we had at the time.”   See all and the original News article here: New Drug Trial Gives Hope for Treatment-Resistant Epilepsy