Walking in Memphis – TARGETing Epilepsy at St. Jude

Memphis, TN. Prior to this year’s AES meeting, the epilepsy genetics community descended upon St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. I had previously largely associated St. Jude with pediatric cancer treatment, but within the last few years, a large-scale pediatric neuroscience program was launched, putting Memphis on the epilepsy genetics map. And with Heather Mefford’s new lab, the program at St. Jude includes one of the major epilepsy genetics groups. While blogging about scientific meetings is always tricky, one particular quote from the first day struck me as particularly relevant for the current state of therapeutic development: “quick, but not too quick”. Here is where the field of epilepsy genetics and precision medicine finds itself at the end of 2022. Continue reading

Five things to know about PURA

PURA. The title of this blog, Beyond the Ion Channel, is intended to reflect the wide variety of genes that can cause epilepsy and related neurodevelopmental conditions. Our last post on CACNA1A brought us back to channelopathies, so this blog post will again shift our focus. This post will introduce the new gene page for PURA, a gene that we did not feature as prominently as we should have. Here are five things to know about PURA, which is relatively recent to be described as a condition, and is likely more common than originally thought. 

Continue reading

Unlocking STXBP1 through Electronic Medical Records

Understanding the EMR. Several weeks ago, I gave a presentation at the STXBP1 Summit conference, the third annual meeting since the first in 2019 – a time when I had just entered the field of neurogenetics. It has been fascinating to follow one of the neurodevelopmental genes with the “fastest growing knowledge,” with the expanded scope of clinical studies and emergence of novel avenues for targeted gene therapies on the horizon. However, one of the many projects our STXBP1 team is currently working on takes a somewhat atypical approach – we aimed to map the natural disease history of STXBP1-related disorders based entirely on reconstructed Electronic Medical Records (EMR). Here are some of the challenges we have had to confront and what we learned searching for meaning in the depth of the EMR. Continue reading