Creating Electrodes to Prevent Seizures

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Beyond Pharmacological Therapy for the Treatment of Epilepsy: Creating Electrodes to Prevent Seizures by Stimulating the Brain

Dr. Brian Litt at the University of Pennsylvania has dedicated his research career to the creation and improvement of flexible, active, implantable electrodes to monitor and stimulate the brain with the goal of curing epilepsy.

Key Points:

Dr. Brian Litt, MD, Professor in both the Departments of Neurology and
Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, obtained a research grant from CURE Epilepsy in 2011 to develop active, flexible, implantable electrodes
to treat epilepsy by stimulating the brain.
* The flexible electrodes are ideal to insert into brain tissue and are able to record brain activity as well as stimulate specific brain areas when a seizure arises, thereby mitigating it.
* Dr. Litt considers the CURE Epilepsy grant that he received to be pivotal to the development of his laboratory. His laboratory has since grown tremendously and has proven to be a very fertile environment, especially for the training of young researchers who have gone on to work on various research strategies to cure epilepsy.

Deep Dive:

Dr. Litt studied Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and obtained his medical degree at Johns Hopkins University. When he started treating patients as a neurologist, he realized that the treatments that were available for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy were mostly based on traditional pharmacological interventions and had limited capacity to significantly change the course of the disease. The lack of alternatives for patients who were resistant to pharmacological treatments inspired him to research electrical stimulation as a new method to treat epilepsy, with the goal of preventing seizures to control the disease.

A research grant from CURE Epilepsy in 2011 for "Flexible Implantable Devices for Epilepsy” was instrumental in the development of these technologies, and in defining Dr. Litt's research trajectory when he started his laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Litt´s laboratory collaborated with Dr. John Rogers, also at the University of Pennsylvania, who had developed the first flexible electrodes but had not tried implanting them in live tissue at the time. Together, their laboratories developed and tested the first brain implants incorporating active electronics for recording seizure activity and stimulating the brain to control seizures.
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