New technique gives new hope for improved anti-epilepsy medication

Comparatively few treatments are available for brain disease, in part because it is difficult to establish the effects and side effects of a substance on the brain, explains the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. 

The standard in medical research is behavioural studies involving rodents, but they are not suitable for use in the search for new drugs via high-throughput screening, which involves testing tens of thousands of substances in parallel.

An international research group led by ETH Zurich has now developed a new test model that makes it possible to examine the effects and side effects of multiple substances at the same time and in large numbers.

The researchers looked for a way to use electrophysiological signals to read and analyse brain activity, which they discovered in the larvae of zebrafish: the tiny larvae are only two millimetres long, allowing the researchers to examine large numbers of them in parallel. 

Using a newly developed algorithm to evaluate the signals from the brain, the researchers even succeeded in re-enacting the trigger for epilepsy.

In their experiments, the researchers also showed how 31 pharmacological substances influence brain waves and that with some drugs, the complexity of the brain activity patterns actually increased. Generally speaking, brain waves in patients with Parkinson’s or schizophrenia tend to be less complex.

If drugs could be used to increase the complexity of brain signals and if this were defined as a therapeutic goal, scientists would finally have a measurement parameter coming directly from the brain to determine the effects and side effects of chemical substances. “This would be a major advance in pharmaceutical research,” said ETH Professor Mehmet Fatih Yanik.

ETH Zurich calls the experiments run by Yanik’s group “a highly promising step in this direction”.