My name is Michael Privitera.
I'm a physician and a neurologist.
I head the Epilepsy Center at the University of
Cincinnati Neuroscience Institute.
I've been working in epilepsy for about 30 years, 27 years, I've been here in
Cincinnati and I did training after residency and a fellowship in epilepsy.
Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain that results in seizures.
What happens during a particular seizure is that nerve cells in the brain,
which are usually firing in lots of different ways,
all get synchronized at once, and then they produce abnormal symptoms.
When you look at people with seizures, with epilepsy,
more than about two-thirds or so can be completely controlled with medications.
So it's a bad disorder to have, but if you connect with the right medicine with
the right person, you can get them under really good control, and
people can live perfectly normal lives with epilepsy for decades.
However, about a third of people don't respond to medications, and so
if what the term we use is medication resistant or intractable epilepsy.
Another term is refractory epilepsy.
But this is a situation where we've tried multiple different medicines, and
they're the right medicines for the particular epilepsy syndrome, and
those medicines don't work.
And about a million people in the United States
have epilepsy that is not completely controlled with medication.
For people with medication resistance seizures, and in the case of Sofia where
she's already tried this surgery of Vagus nerve stimulation,
which is a minor surgery, and then two separate brain surgeries.
Where she's actually had parts of her brain removed to try to stop the seizures.
When those things don't work,
you're really kind of at the end of all the standard treatments.
Many companies are working, and many scientists are working on new drugs.
Looking at different ways of affecting these neurons and
trying to keep those nerve cells from firing abnormally.
So there's always new drugs in the pipeline.
There are a large number of people with medication resistant seizures,
or intractable epilepsy, who are desperate for new treatments, so
we're always really trying to work on it.
One of the new things that's been in the news quite a bit is CBD,
the derivative of marijuana, the cannabidiol.
There have been some stories in the news about,
especially children having remarkable results in kids that
had not been controlled with bouts of other treatments.
I think this is really exciting.
I think it's an opportunity, it's a possibility that something that may really
work, but we really need more research in the area.
There's no question at this point that the DEA scheduling of marijuana
as a Schedule I drug makes it almost impossible to do the kind of research that
we need to do to try to look at the safety and the effectiveness
of marijuana and its derivatives, especially cannabidiol, or CBD.
A Schedule 1 listing puts so
many restrictions on the kinds of centers that can do the work, and
the kinds of things that restrict the research.
It will clearly slow down our ability to try and
figure out whether CBD is actually an effective treatment or not.
This is a totally different receptor area,
a totally different approach to treating seizures.
So, I think maybe some of us are excited that it
would be acting very different than any other existing antiepileptic drug.
And if it was really an effective treatment for some of these children, or
some of the adults, that there may be other variations that you could make on
it that would maybe be less toxic, or less intoxicating, or
maybe have less long-term effects.
So, again, it's a new target, potential target for
treating epilepsy, that's exciting, I think, to all of us.