Therapeutic Novel therapeutic target for epilepsy

Epilepsy is a common and serious disease that affects around 50 million people worldwide. The mortality rate among people with epilepsy is two to three times higher than the general population. Dr Michael Johnson and colleagues have used systems biology approaches to dissect brain co-expression networks from epilepsy patients and identified novel therapeutic targets for epilepsy, and new pathways for neurodevelopmental disease. This work represents a successful example of interaction between Imperial’s clinical, experimental and mathematical strengths, and recently led to an agreement with the biopharmaceutical company UCB Pharma for the discovery of new drug targets and therapeutic leads in epilepsy using computational genomics, and for translating these discoveries in early phase clinical studies.