Investigation of cellular, subcellular and network changes in therapy-resistant epilepsies

Our laboratory investigates cortical tissue removed due to therapy-resistant epilepsy and compares it with a short post-mortem interval sample from control subjects without neurological disease. The process is described in the "Methods" tab.

The three main causes of therapy-resistant epilepsy are tumour, hippocampal sclerosis and focal cortical dysplasia, and most commonly develop in the temporal lobe. Our group and its predecessor described several alterations of interneurons and their connections in temporal lobe epilepsy with or without hippocampal sclerosis. Currently, our main area of investigation is epilepsy associated with focal cortical dysplasia. In this context, we have described alterations in parvalbumin-containing perisomatic innervation and we intensively investigate impairments of the cannabinoid system, microglia and blood-brain barrier elements in the disease.