Title:How to Find Candidate Drug-targets for Antiepileptogenic Therapy?
VOLUME: 18 ISSUE: 7
Author(s):Nian Yu , Xing-jian Lin* and Qing Di *
Affiliation:Department of Neurology, The Affiliated Nanjing Brain Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, 210029, Nanjing, Department of Neurology, The Affiliated Nanjing Brain Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, 210029, Nanjing, Department of Neurology, The Affiliated Nanjing Brain Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, 210029, Nanjing
Keywords:Epileptogenesis, antiepileptogenesis, anti-epileptogenic drugs, drug targets, immunomodulators, precipitating
epileptogenic events.
Abstract:Although over 25 antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) have become currently available for clinical
use, the incidence of epilepsy worldwide and the proportions of drug-resistant epilepsy among
them are not significantly reduced during the past decades. Traditional screens for AEDs have been
mainly focused on their anti-ictogenic roles, and their efficacies primarily depend on suppressing
neuronal excitability or enhancing inhibitory neuronal activity, almost without the influence on the
epileptogenesis or with inconsistent results from different studies. Epileptogenesis refers to the
pathological process of a brain from its normal status to the alterations with the continuous prone of
unprovoked spontaneous seizures after brain insults, such as stroke, traumatic brain injury, CNS
infectious, and autoimmune disorders, and even some specific inherited conditions. Recently growing
experimental and clinical studies have discovered the underlying mechanisms for epileptogenesis,
which are multi-aspect and multistep. These findings provide us a number of interesting sites for
antiepileptogenic drugs (AEGDs). AEGDs have been evidenced as significantly roles of postponing
or completely blocking the development of epilepsy in experimental models. The present review
will introduce potential novel candidate drug-targets for AEGDs based on the published studies.
