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Epilepsy is a debilitating but surprisingly common neurological disorder, with 1 in 26 people in the United States developing it over the course of their lives [2]. Despite the availability of numerous antiseizure medications (ASMs), one-third of people with epilepsy have seizures that remain treatment-resistant [3]. There are many possible causes of epilepsy, ranging from traumatic brain injuries to specific genetic mutations. Regardless of the cause, treatment remains primarily empirical or based on observation, with patients and their epileptologists often trying different and multiple ASMs in an attempt to eliminate the seizures while managing unwanted side effects. Ideally, treatments for epilepsy would precisely target the underlying biological mechanism, control seizures, and reduce the occurrence of negative side effects.
Optimism for this approach of “precision medicine” for epilepsy grew following the complete sequencing of the human genome and fueled the hope that individual genetic information could be used to develop more specific ways to treat epilepsy. Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, is the “tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient. It does not literally mean the creation of drugs or medical devices that are unique to a patient, but rather the ability to classify individuals into subpopulations that differ in their susceptibility to a particular disease or their response to a specific treatment.” Unfortunately, for most types of genetic epilepsy, the individual genetic makeup of a patient has not yet translated to clinical application of precision medicines for epilepsy. This has been due, in part, to the complexity of the underlying biological mechanisms as well as limitations in the technologies needed to advance genetic discovery to appropriate treatments.
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