SynapCell

See you in madrid !

SynapCell will attend the 16th EILAT Conference on New Antiepileptic Drugs and Devices, this year occuring in Madrid.
Corinne ROUCARD, CEO and co-Founder will present you how the MTLE model provides an efficient way to identify new treatment for drug-resistant forms of focal epilepsies.

For more information about the EILAT XVI Conference : eilatxvi.com
To see the program of the conference, click here.

brief insight:

Optimising the discovery and selection of new therapeutic strategies in epilepsy

- Abstract

Roucard Corinne, Evrard Alexis, Gharbi Hedi, Volle Julien, Roche Yann, Duveau Venceslas

Despite many anti-epileptic drugs (AED) already on the market, still a significant number of epileptic patients are in needs of more effective and safer drugs. These unmet needs call for a different view of how drug discovery (DD) in epilepsy is performed. Moreover, new strategies are requested by legal authorities to address disease modifying effect or anti-epileptogenic strategies. Over the last years, new therapeutic strategies have largely been explored such as cell or gene therapies, requiring a change in the paradigm on how to easily and objectively evaluate these new strategies.

SynapCell has developed translational Drug Discovery programs for AEDs that have already assessed more than 500 drug candidates in the last 17 years such as:

  • Evaluation of small libraries of AEDs to identify lead compounds
  • Classical dose-dependent anti-epileptic effect of compounds (lead validation)
  • Anti-epileptogenic effect of small molecules
  • Anti-epileptic and/or disease modifying potential for gene and cell therapies
  • Identification of therapeutic targets by transposing our validated models to transgenic animals
  • Repositioning of AEDs in related pathologies such as essential Tremor or pain.

In this poster, we will present results obtained from some of the above mentioned programs.
We will show results obtained with retigabine on drug-resistant focal epilepsy using our translational mesio-temporal lobe epilepsy mouse model (MTLE mouse). We will show how retigabine at 20, 40 and 80mg/kg reduces hippocampal paroxysmal discharges (HPD) by up to 80%, in a comparative experimental design involving reference AEDs: valproate (150 and 300mg/kg), carbamazepine (26 and 40mg/kg), lamotrigine (17 and 34mg/kg), diazepam (2.5 and 5 mg/kg) and levetiracetam (600mg/kg).

We will further illustrate the use of the MTLE mouse in derisking potential tolerance of compounds with the example of diazepam.

Finally, we will also present examples in the context of generalized epilepsy, including our model of absence epilepsy, GAERS, and an innovative EEG-based approach to the model of temporal lobe epilepsy with secondarily generalized seizures, the amygdala kindling rat model.

In this work we will demonstrate how our epilepsy DD programs have helped many drug makers to select the right strategy for the development of their various therapeutical strategies.