If we could only understand how the brain becomes epileptic, then we should be able to prevent this process ...

This concept shot into my brain on a clear evening in Houston, Texas, when I was asked to give a shot of the hormone ACTH to a baby with infantile spasms.As a pediatric resident in training, I knew little about this form of early-life epilepsy, or why it responded to an injection of a natural stress hormone. Faed with the baby and the gleaming syringe of ACTH, a passion arose within me. A passion to undersand that baby's brain and the mysterious processes that were taking place inside it, corrupting the normal activity of his developing brain cells into seizures. That passion has remained with me to date.

We have made a great deal of progress since that muggy day in Houston. I have gone on to set up a successful research lab that studies seizures and epilepsies of infants and children. We focus on infantile spasms (perhaps the most devastating epilepsy) and on febrile seizures (the most common seizures of childhood). Based in California, we have come up with ideas about the reason that babvies with infantile spasms respond to ACTH and have used models to test these ideas to try and design better medicines for this disorder. We have also created a model of long febrile seizures, to better under-stand how they arise and what they might do to the brain. The path from that original day in Houston to the pres-ent has had its challenges. The largest hurdles occurred early and consisted of the need to fund experiments that validate our ideas, thus enabling us to convince the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reviewers to support our research long term. Indeed, perhaps the toughest segment of the road to discovering the mechanisms of epilepsy is the conversion of novel, perhaps revolutionary, ideas into facts. During these initial steps, when ideas alone existed, obtaining fiscal support to perform the initia critical experiements was a daunting challenge.

This was the time in my own voyage when the Epilepsy Foundation stepped in. My proposal was reviewed by other epilepsy researchers who believed in its potential. Importantly, funds provided by the Epilepsy Foundation allowed me to perform crucial experiments that permit-ted larger proposals to NIH. We have since validated many promising ideas about infantile spasms and febrile seizures. The original support from the Epilepsy Foundation has been leveraged manyfold. Importantly, the studies we have performed in the intervening years hold promise for new types of therapies for infantile spasms and to a potential prediction of the development of epilepsy after prolonged febrile seizures. I am thankful to the Epilepsy Foundaiton and to the people providing its research funds, for allowing my passion to flower into these results. I occassionaly reflect back on the baby in the muggy evening in Houston, and wonder if he became seizure free. I hope the research we are doncudingt leads to better therapy for thousands of babies in Texas, California and around the world.

Dr. Tallie Z. Baram, M.D., Ph.D., is founder and executive committee chair of University of California Irvine’s Epilepsy Research Center. She is considered the world’s leading investigator of the basic neural mechanisms involved in childhood febrile seizures and how prolonged febrile seizures might lead to the onset of adult epilepsy.