Commercial assessment of a novel protocol for epilepsy characterisation with temporally interfering electric fields
The ERC StG project “Epilepsy Controlled with Electronic Neurotransmitter Delivery (EPI-Centrd)” is focused on improved therapeutic intervention in drug-resistant patients with surgically-complicated forms of epilepsy. These patients represent a large demographic needing new commercial solutions, as there are fifty million people in the world with epilepsy and up to 50 cases of new-onset epilepsy per 100,000 people each year, where 30% of these cases are patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. Although EPI-Centrd provides state-of-the-art treatments for epileptic zones in the brain of drug-resistant patients, it does not include technology for improved identification of such epileptic zones. This ERC PoC project “The Commercial Assessment of a Novel Protocol for Epilepsy Characterisation with Temporally Interfering Electric Fields (CONECTIF)” dramatically improves the traditional limitations in the identification of epileptic zones in the brain of patients by providing a simplified, less-invasive method capable of localizing epileptic tissue, including the ability to non-invasively investigate previously inaccessibility and surgically-complicated brain regions. The new method utilizing temporally interfering electric fields could have a massive commercial potential and, if successful, would dramatically improve the therapeutic targets for technologies developed in the EPI-Centrd project and for the identification of epileptic zones in other forms of epilepsy, not only in drug-resistant patients.