Sun. Oct 13, 2019 10:30 AM - 12:10 PM Room 5 (410)

Organizer / Chair: ‌Zhong CHEN (Deparment of Pharmacology, College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, China), Co-chair: Kazuhiko YANAI (Department of Pharmacology, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Japan), Discussant: ‌Motohiro OKADA (Department of Neuropsychiatry, Mie University, Japan)

Epilepsy is a disease characterized by recurrent seizures, which are transient symptoms of abnormal, excessive, or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. It affects more than 50 million people worldwide. Antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) are the mainstay of the management of epilepsy for most patients. The majority of the AEDs used in the clinic work by either reducing brain excitability or by enhancing inhibition both of which disrupt normal functioning and lead to many side effects. Still, many patients are not able to achieve adequate control and they require lifelong medication, a situation rife with long-term disruptive side effects that even worsen the initial condition. Poor control of seizures and seizure-related serious injuries and complications are a heavy burden for patients and for society. Thus, the development of safe and effective new drugs or novel therapeutic approaches for controlling seizures in people with drug-resistant epilepsy represents a major clinical goal. Recent years saw substantial progress in the field of epilepsy relevant to preclinical and clinical epilepsy research, such as development of new AED targets, novel optogentic or chemogenetic approaches control of epileptic seizure, finding of new epileptogenetic genes, neural circuit mechanism of epilepsy based on mutiple-channels EEG recording and imaging, the updated clinical epilepsy definition, and so on. All of these would be very important to improve management of the epilepsies in the future.