A team of researchers from the Hospital Universitario de La Princesa led by neurosurgeon Cristina Torres and researcher Mª Carmen Ovejero from the NEUROFAN group at the School of Pharmacy of CEU San Pablo University, have been able to identify a new subtype of brain cells involved in drug-resistant epilepsy. This discovery joins the identification of a potential blood marker discovered by the same group of researchers that could predict drug-resistant epilepsy. The scientific journals Molecular Neurobiology and Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology have already published the results of these two studies, which involved a multidisciplinary team of neurologists, neurosurgeons, biochemists, biologists, pathologists and data scientists from both centres.

There is a type of epilepsy, known as drug-resistant epilepsy, in which the effectiveness of drug treatment is greatly reduced. The low level of response to drugs in a quarter of patients diagnosed with epilepsy is the starting point for research carried out by the Hospital Universitario de La Princesa and CEU San Pablo University, with the aim of finding out what processes occur in the brains of these patients. The researchers, Mª Carmen Ovejero and Cristina Torres, the latter a neurosurgeon at the  Madrid centre, hope that the advances resulting from the studies will help to better understand the disease and obtain new drugs.

Drug-resistant epilepsy, the objective of both studies

The first study was able to discover a subtype of brain cells involved in epilepsy that cannot be treated with drugs. By analysing brain tissue samples from such patients, it was possible to conclude that some of these cells, called astrocytes, had twice the DNA content of normal cells.

A second study was able to identify a potential blood marker for drug-resistant epilepsy by analysing millions of bioinformatics data of simultaneous epigenetic marks in blood and brain tissue. This is a key finding that could aid in the early detection of the disease and the selection of patients for epilepsy surgery.

Patients who do not respond to any type of treatment are candidates for this operation in which the malfunctioning brain fragment is surgically removed. The procedure has very effective results for those who are in an early stage of the disease, so early detection is essential.

The identification of these biomarkers has been published in the magazine Molecular Neurobiology, while confirmation of the existence of double DNA-containing astrocytes and their involvement in epilepsy has reached the pages of the scientific journal Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology.

More information

Blood biomarkers: Sánchez Jiménez et al. “DNA Methylation Description of Hippocampus, Cortex, Amygdala, and Blood of Drug Resistant Temporal Lobe Epilepsy”, Molecular Neurobiology 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12035-022-03180-z

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12035-022-03180-z

Astrocytes with double DNA content: Sanz-García A, Sánchez-Jiménez P, Granero-Cremades I, et al. “Neuronal and astrocytic tetraploidy is increased in drug-resistant epilepsy”, Neuropathol Appl Neurobiol. 2022; e12873. 

https://doi.org/10.1111/nan.12873