Three things I learned about focal epilepsies on the Faroe Islands

Focal to genetic. While there was little interest in the genetics of focal epilepsies only five years ago, the field has gained significant momentum since the discovery of DEPDC5 and the subsequent new appreciation of the mTOR pathway. This finding resulted in several gene discoveries and linked traditional genetic epilepsies with the emerging field of somatic mutations. In May 2017, the European epilepsy genetics community met on the Faroe Islands for the international conference on focal epilepsy. Here are the three things that I learned about focal epilepsies on the Faroe Islands. Continue reading

Absence of evidence – where are the recessive epilepsy genes?

E2. When we work up a new-onset epileptic encephalopathy in clinical practice, there is a discrepancy between what we know and what we do. While we know that we have an almost 30% chance to find a causative de novo mutation in any of the known epilepsy genes, we usually think about a possible underlying inherited metabolic disorder when we order our first round of tests. However, the full phenotypic spectrum is often unknown and the question remained how many of these inherited metabolic disorders are missed. In our recent publication of the E2 consortium, we looked for evidence of inherited genetic disorders in patients with epileptic encephalopathies. Follow us on our journey that led to a negative answer, but uncovered a complexity in finding inherited diseases that we did not anticipate. Continue reading

E2 – collaborations and lessons learnt

E2. The advent of next generation sequencing allowed unimagined scope for large scale genetic studies. It quickly became clear that whilst new technologies could be used to solve single families, major advances would only occur by collaboration. This led to the formation of a number of Consortia – in the United States EPGP leading onto Epi4K and in Europe EuroEPINOMICS and EpiRES etc as well as a number of smaller consortia. Even with these multicentre collaborations it was clear that “bigger was better”, and attempts were made to try and synergize efforts across continents.  Continue reading