This was epilepsy genetics in 2022

Looking back. This is our final blog post for 2022 and a good opportunity to look back at what happened in the last 12 months in epilepsy genetics. In brief, it was a busy time and if I were to look back at 2022 in a few years, I would probably characterize this year as a transitional year. Antisense oligonucleotides, gene therapies, and other novel treatments are on the horizon, but the field is not quite there yet. For this blog post, I would like to put the focus on five discoveries in 2022 that did not receive as much attention on our blog as they probably should have. Continue reading

Here are the most frequently read blog posts in epilepsy genetics

2022. In December, our blog passed an important milestone – one million views. Given that Beyond the Ion Channel is a niche blog on epilepsy genetics and pediatric neurogenetics, this is a milestone that we are proud of. In the current post, we would like to examine some of the trends on what people read on our blog. Given that this resource has been around for more than a decade, the topics and genes that people searched for reflect some interesting patterns in the field that may tell us about how information on genetic epilepsy is presented online and what we need to do better. Here are top five most frequently read posts, including some topics that surprised us. Continue reading

DNM1 and when transcripts matter more than genes

What comes next. Earlier this month, Ingo made a bit of a splash at the American Epilepsy Society Annual Course, with his surprising comment that, in some contexts, “genes don’t matter.” This was in reference to transcripts and gene expression, which ultimately determine if and how variants can cause disease. In this post, I wanted to explore this idea, diving into the world of transcripts and their increasing relevance in approaching diagnosis and treatment of genetic epilepsies and neurodevelopmental disorders. And I wanted to share one of the most surprising findings in epilepsy genetics in 2022, namely, how examining transcripts rather than genes helped us understand how an intronic variant can be dominant-negative. Continue reading

Revisiting the phenotypic gap – the value in absent phenotypes

Phenotypic bottleneck. This is another post in the “phenotypic atomism series,” what has become our lab’s philosophy in how we think about and work with longitudinal clinical data. However, before we introduce another dimension to the phenotypic atom, let me first revisit the idea of the “phenotypic bottleneck” – a concept that had piqued my interest three years ago and led me to join the lab. In brief, in contrast to established pipelines for large-scale analysis of sequencing data, our ability to analyze clinical data at scale remains more limited. As a result, phenotypic characterization lags behind gene discovery, even with tremendous progress in the last few years. A major challenge stems from the inherent nature of working with multi-dimensional longitudinal clinical data: it can be sparse and incomplete at times. However, how much of the unknown is truly unknown?

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AES 2022 – Soundbites from Nashville, Tennessee

Music City. This year’s Annual Meeting of the American Epilepsy Society (AES) took place in Nashville, Tennessee. With a pre-meeting in Memphis and the annual Clinical Skills Workshop as the final event of the annual meeting, our team was able to spend more than a week in the Volunteer State. Yes, there is more than enough music in Nashville and it is virtually impossible to step into a pub, restaurant, or Honky Tonk without live music. Now that my ears have recovered, here is a summary of epilepsy genetics at AES 2022. Continue reading

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. 

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CACNA1A – five things to know in 2022

Epilepsy genes. It has admittedly been quiet around the gene pages on our blog and many pages require an update. When we initially launched the Epilepsiome pages, we wanted to create a small resource for gene-based information according to the “what you need to know” principle, a condensed digest regarding epilepsy genes written by clinicians and researchers with deep expertise in the field. We chose CACNA1A as the first gene to get an update. The reason for this is the following: Laina has taken on the role of modernizing this blog and CACNA1A is the main condition that she is working on. Here are five things to know in 2022 about CACNA1A. Continue reading

What the beach told me about science in 2022

Rehoboth. In 2013, I started a small segment on our blog that reflected on the summer and my time at the beach, weaving in small anecdotes that happened during my summer vacation. This was nine years ago and I have to admit that I didn’t keep up this annual tradition as well as I could have and I would like to start it up again. Here are my 2022 thoughts about the beach and science and what we learn about biomedical research during the times when we are not actually involved in it. While putting this post together, I realized that this year’s theme is about limitations. So how does a beach vacation relate to limitations and how does this all fit together? Please bear with me. Continue reading

The 2022 STXBP1 Summit – a personal reflection

STXBP1 in Philly. From August 18-20, the STXBP1 community met in the Bellevue Hotel in Philadelphia, the first in-person summit after our initial Philadelphia meeting in 2019. Much has changed since our initial meeting – an entire scientific community has woken up to study one of the most common (and enigmatic) neurodevelopmental disorders, the STXBP1 Foundation has grown significantly in activities and scope, and there are very promising developments in the main therapeutic areas, namely drug development, antisense oligonucleotides, and gene therapy. It is not an exaggeration to say that STXBP1 is on the map in 2022 and it is one of the genes with the fastest growing knowledge. Here are my personal reflections from the 2022 STXBP1 Summit – and I want to thank our entire ENGIN team for their fantastic work during our first Synapse Clinic the day before the Summit. Continue reading