Personalized and Stratified Therapy in Epilepsy

Dr. Eyal is a senior lecturer at the HUJI Institute for Drug Research since 2011. Her research is aimed at better understanding of the factors that affect drug distribution across the blood-brain barrier (BBB), introducing novel markers for studying molecular changes at the BBB itself and developing delivery systems which would be able to overcome the anatomical and functional barriers to the CNS. In particular, she focuses on identification and targeting epileptogenic brain tissue. She has published more than 50 papers, is on the Editorial Board of Frontiers in Pharmacology; Drug Transport and Metabolism, and recently edited a special issue of Pharmaceutical Research on drug treatment in pregnant and breastfeeding women. Dr. Eyal is a member of the Steering Committee of the Israeli League against Epilepsy. Dr. Ekstein is the Director of the Epilepsy Unit in the Department of Neurology at Hadassah Medical Centre. She is an adult epileptologist, familiar with all aspects of patients care, including pharmacotherapy, surgical treatment, psychosocial issues, and imaging and electrophysiological studies. As part of the PhD and following basic research, she has also expertise in animal models of epilepsy, translational research on epileptic tissue identification, and rodents and human electrophysiology. She is the author of more than 30 original and review papers and several book chapters, and ad-hoc reviewer for several epilepsy journals. Dr. Ekstein is the head of the Epilepsy Unit at Hadassah Medical Center, Israel, and head of the Israeli Chapter of the ILAE.

Section 1. Diagnosis 1. Classification 2. Seizures semiology 3. Genetic testing 4. Electrophysiological studies 5. Imaging

Section 2. Drug treatment 6. When to start AEDs 7. Antiepileptic drug treatments in children 8. Treating women with epilepsy 9. Antiepileptic drugs in the elderly 10. When to stop treatment: individualized 11. Pharmacogenetics in AED treatment 12. Between-patient variability in the concentrations of antiepileptic drugs 13. Drug resistance: predicting who will respond

Section 3. Non-pharmacological treatments 14. Pre-surgical evaluation 15. Adult tailored surgical aspects 16. Pediatric tailored surgical aspects 17. Neurostimulation

Section 4. Miscellaneous 18. Status epilepticus 19. SUDEP 20. Monitoring sensors 21. Psychiatric co-morbidity 22. Neuropsychological evaluation 23. Patient education

Section 5. Frontiers/research 24. Seizures prediction 25. Epilepsy biomarkers 26. Can we personalize AED development? 27. Invasive monitoring research 28. New treatment devices