Current Portfolio
- Epilepsy
- Bone disease
- Nanotoxicity testing
- Abdominal pain studies
- Brain cell imaging
- Huntington's disease
- Breast Cancer
- Viral encephalitis
- Chronic pain in arthritis and fibromyalgia
- Bacterial infection in cystic fibrosis
- Advances in human neuroscience
- Neurofibromatosis
- Hypersecretion of mucus in asthma
- Premature birth
- A clearer picture of pain relief
- Tissue engineering of human liver
- Creating knockout tissues
- Skin cancer
- Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
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Epilepsy
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2010 – 2012 Research Assistant Fellowship The in vitro epileptic human brain slice: relating mechanistic features to clinical EEGDr M. Cunningham & Professor M. Whittington |
Of all the human brain disorders, epilepsy ranks as one that currently uses a substantial number of laboratory animals, such as mice and rats, for the purpose of scientific studies worldwide. By using drugs, electrical stimulation or prolonged hyperthermia an artificial epileptic state is induced in these animals. In such experiments, up to 50 animals may be used to test various different aspects or treatments of an epileptic brain. These animal studies range from those that can be considered to cause minimum discomfort and pain, to procedures that are more invasive and distressing to the animal.
The limitations of the current animal model approach to epilepsy research are twofold:
i) The electrical signals recorded in animal studies do not fully capture the complex electrical patterns observed in the human condition.
ii) The sustained use of animal models of epilepsy has failed to assist in the design of evidence based drugs for the treatment of the condition.
This new project aims to address these shortcomings by removing animals in epilepsy research and addressing the issue directly in humans and human tissue.
The Research Group has previously established human in vitro electrophysiology recording techniques such as EEG (electroencephalography) which has permitted the researchers to examine the mechanisms of this behaviour in the epileptic human brain in vitro (using tissue slices) and in silico (through computer modelling using human data). One aspect of EEG activity important for diagnostic purposes is the occurrence of very fast oscillations (VFOs) in brain recordings. VFOs appear in recordings from epileptic sites prior to the generation of a epileptic seizure and in-between periods of epileptic seizure. The Research Group now plans to extend these previous studies using multi-electrode recording techniques with the aim of:
i) Refining their existing human in vitro model to examine the transition from non-epileptic activity to epileptic activity
ii) Examining novel patterns of brain activity during epilepsy previously only observed in invasive EEG recordings in patients.
Using a combination of multi-electrode arrays, conventional electrophysiology and epileptic human brain slices, the following questions will be addressed:
1) Is there a correlation between the regionalised loss of parvalbumin interneuron expression (expression of particular proteins prevalant in brain neurons) and regions of epileptiform activity in human intractable epilepsy?
2) Does a unique histopathological profile (the microscopic structure of neurons) give rise to a novel pattern of human cortical epileptiform activity?
3) What are the implications for cortical network function of the implementation of human epileptic in vitro electrophysiological and neuroanatomical data in an in silico model?
By answering these questions in human epileptic tissue slices, the researchers aim to show that researcher do not need to work on animals in order to understand epilepsy.