MRFF funding success for discovering new drugs for epilepsy using personalised medicine

CIA Professor Patrick Kwan (left)  and  CIB Dr Ben Rollo (right),
both in the Central Clinical School’s Department of Neuroscience. 
The team includes CIC Dr Chris Langmead (Drug Discovery Biology, MIPS), 
CID Dr Katie Ayers (MCRI) and CIE Dr Alexander Harris (UniMelb)

Congratulations to Professor Patrick Kwan and colleagues, who have been awarded a MRFF Stem Cell Therapies Mission grant for $556,460. This grant was part of a suite to support research on treatments for incurable disease announced by the Commonwealth Minister for Health Greg Hunt on 20 June.

Epilepsy is a severe neurological disease which affects over 70 million people globally. Despite a concerted effort to identify new anti-seizure medications (ASMs) over the last 25 years, epilepsy remains uncontrolled in 30% of individuals, a condition known as drug-resistant epilepsy. Therefore, there exists an urgent unmet clinical need to identify new effective drugs to treat epilepsy.