Personalised brain stimulation for epilepsy
Emerging Leader Fellowship
£299,455
Mr Aswin Chari
Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London
One in three children with epilepsy has seizures that are not controlled by medication, leading to ongoing seizures, injury, reduced quality of life, and an increased risk of sudden death. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an emerging treatment in which electrodes are placed in the thalamus to help reduce seizures. While early results are promising, current approaches typically stimulate the same brain region in all patients, even though different individuals may have seizures driven by different parts of the thalamus.
This fellowship will use data from clinical research studies at Great Ormond Street Hospital and UCL to develop a personalised approach to DBS for childhood epilepsy. It includes four linked workstreams: analysing TRICS study data to identify which thalamic regions are most involved using MRI and stimulation responses; validating findings using large existing datasets from children and adults with epilepsy in the MELD project; testing personalised DBS settings in the CADET-F study by analysing EEG signals to optimise stimulation for each individual; and conducting patient, parent, and carer focus groups to guide study design and future research.
This research aims to improve outcomes for children with drug-resistant epilepsy by enabling more precise, personalised deep brain stimulation rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. In the near term, it could improve how DBS settings are selected and tested. In the longer term, it may lead to more effective, widely adopted DBS treatments within the NHS and internationally, and could also provide a framework for applying similar personalised neuromodulation approaches to other brain disorders.
