Lentiviral gene therapy could offer relief to refractory epilepsy patients

Within a year, University College London researchers hope to begin a clinical trial of a gene therapy for epilepsy, a non-monogenic disorder. The hope is that the approach will offer an alternative to brain surgery for patients who fail to respond to oral therapies.

In a Journal of Neuroscience paper published last month, the authors showed that a gene therapy encoding KCNA1 reduced the number of focal seizures in neocortical and temporal lobe rat models of epilepsy...