Bouvé College’s Ganesh Thakur, PhD, has received a five-year, $1.24 million grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to help develop a new treatment for temporal lobe epilepsy, the most common form of focal epilepsy in adults.
Thakur, Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences, is co-leading the project with Robert Laprairie, PhD, of the University of Saskatchewan, along with USask researchers Drs. Howland and Botterill.
Temporal lobe epilepsy can be difficult to treat: about a third of patients don’t respond to standard medications, and it’s the leading reason people undergo epilepsy surgery. The research team is working on a new type of drug that works with the brain’s own cannabinoid system, similar to how marijuana affects the brain, but without the high. Rather than acting like THC, the compounds are designed to boost the brain’s natural chemical signals only in areas that are already active, which the team hopes will control seizures without the intoxication and tolerance associated with THC.
Early versions of these compounds have already shown promise in reducing seizures in animal studies of other forms of epilepsy. The grant will fund the next phase of work, refining the drug candidates and testing them in animal models of temporal lobe epilepsy specifically.
If successful, the treatment could eventually offer patients a non-intoxicating option that helps them avoid brain surgery.
