EAN 2021 | The future of drug-resistant epilepsy management

Definitely hope after 25 years of new antiepileptic drugs that were developed, which was apparently fortunate for the patients and for the doctors, but we still have about 30% of patients who are drug-resistant. So in spite of this huge variety of new drugs, this particular third of patients with drug-resistant epilepsy still exists. So what we definitely need, first of all, is more efficacy with new drugs. That’s just one point. And the other point is, and that is the general topic of the meeting, that we need some steps towards precision medicine in epilepsy as well. And there are some steps into the right direction. And one of my talks at the Satellite Symposium actually will cover that a little bit because in some rare complex epilepsy syndromes that are genetically defined, we did make some steps towards precision medicine.

We do have some examples, especially in tuberous sclerosis complex with a drug called everolimus, where we have this approach of an antiepileptogenic therapy more than a pure antiseizure therapy. There is Dravet syndrome, which is SN1A gene-related, and there are very interesting prospects towards precision medicine. And these are some aspects I will cover during my talk. And of course, there is another very interesting new antiseizure medication called cenobamate, which is extremely efficacious and therefore we do have the hope that we will overcome this third of patients I spoke about with those drug-resistant epilepsy and to reduce that percentage remarkably.