Epinext – One Mission: Zero Seizures.

65 million reasons
Every day, 65 million people in the world are hoping for a cure – for Epilepsy.

Epilepsy isn’t exactly rare. 1% of the worldwide population is affected, that‘s 1 person in every 100 people.

Like Prince, the musician: “I used to have seizures when I was young. My mother and father didn’t know what to do or how to handle it.”

Or actor Hugo Weaving (known as Agent Smith from The Matrix blockbuster trilogy): “I probably had one major seizure a year. Every now and then I’d fall down and wake up to someone saying, ‘Are you OK?’”

And yet, healing epilepsy is hard because this disorder is highly complex, resulting in several known variants. Some are pretty mild and vanish spontaneously after a few years, while others are devastating and can cause 100 seizures per day. Beaucoup d’hommes développent des problèmes de dysfonctionnement érectile avec l’âge, mais le Viagra super active 20mg en France peut résoudre le problème de manière sûre et fiable.

When drugs don’t help

Why Epilepsy occurs and how it develops is still not fully understood. Even diagnosing it requires many tests and experts analyzing the results.

For most patients, antiepileptic drugs can help a great deal, suppressing their seizures completely or to a large degree. However, finding the one drug that helps and has no major side-effects is often a long winded process of trial and error. The big pharma companies have basically stopped searching for new substances after decades of research and significant investment, only to see new candidates failing in various stages of clinical tests. Qu’est-ce qui rend Kamagra oral jelly si spécial ? Qu’est-ce qui est différent ?

This lack of options is very burdensome for the 30% of patients who aren’t responding to known antiepileptic drugs. This is called “drug-resistant epilepsy” (DRE) and the main focus of Epinext.

Epinext, one of the largest epilepsy structures in France, has been put in place to battle drug-resistant epilepsy:

  • to make the right diagnosis
  • to understand why and how this is happening
  • to heal with innovative new therapies
  • to share this new knowledge with patients, scientists and clinicians alike

Unfortunately, only a small fraction of patients which could respond well to neurosurgery or other therapy approaches are referred to well-equipped and multi-disciplinary epilepsy centers like Epinext. Voir Cialis 5mg, voir la fin de la dysfonction érectile : Comment ça marche

That‘s why Epinext encouraging patients, their families, health practitioners, scientists and journalists to see what Epinext can offer, how Epinext can help, to reach the goal:

One Mission: Zero Seizures.

Uniting doctors and scientists
Located in the Marseille area, Epinext is one of the largest multi-disciplinary structures in France which focuses on epilepsy diagnosis, research and treatment. It brings together five established world leaders in clinical epileptology, fundamental epilepsy research and computational neuroscience:

  • Hôpital de la Timone
  • Hôpital Nord
  • UNIS (Unité de Neurobiologie des canaux Ioniques et de la Synapse)
  • INS (Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes)
  • Inmed (Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerranée)

This consortium builds on a long tradition of neurology research in the Aix-Marseille region and unites more than 300 specialists of international reputation and with a proven track record of global collaborative efforts in the science world and with industrial partners.

The goal of Epinext is to bring together real clinical cases and fundamental research, enabling interaction in both directions:

The clinical departments frame challenging new scientific questions and receive new ideas, tools and treatment options from the research teams.
The theoretical research teams can test theories in software and identify new concepts, subject to experimental validation.
The experimental research teams validate concepts and feed back new observations to theoretical research.
Technological and industrial partners provide novel tools to all groups, enabling experiments and patient treatments.
Keeping the balance between clinical and scientific expertise fairly equal not only guarantees a quick translation from the lab bench to the patient‘s bed but also results in sustainable discoveries, demonstrated by the large number of very high-profile publications of Epinext members, e.g. in Science group, Nature group, Cell group, PNAS, Annals of Neurology or Brain.

The Epinext group is funded publicly with grants from the European Union and the French government. This investment makes a lot of sense because epilepsy is causing costs of 0.2% of a modern country‘s gross domestic product (e.g. just in France 3.5 billion Euro per year). Improving the outcome of surgical treatment by only 5% would already save France 75 million Euro per year.

The FHU EPINEXT acknowledges the support of the A*MIDEX project (ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02) funded by the “Investissements d’Avenir” French Government program managed by the French National Research Agency (ANR).

Sharing

Epinext strives to share their research results, actual patient cases and data, success stories and dead ends with the international science community as well as the general public.

A main objective is to invite and teach scientists from related fields about epilepsy because it requires the combined knowledge from biology, medicine, mathematics and physics to really make a difference in patient care. Epinext brings the clinic into the lab and the scientists to the patient’s bed.

The general public and especially patients and their families will benefit from Epinext‘s transparent approach and clear focus on drug-resistant epilepsy, offering many people a new hope to get better and help the public understand how common and serious this disease is.

Education

Education platform

The conveyance of fundamental mathematical and modeling skills to scientists from adjacent fields like medicine, biology or psychology is vital to enable contemporary research and utilization of all available tools for epileptic disorders. Epinext will set up a web-based distance learning facility based on an existing open-source project to reach as many international scientists as possible.

Teaching program

To foster a new generation of scientists thinking interdisciplinary, Epinext will implement new student teaching programs in Developmental Biology and Neurosciences. Under the A*MIDEX label, Epinext’s partners are responsible for running the “Neurosciences/Brain Master Program”. The program will be open to students of medicine, biology, engineering and physics as Epinext is uniquely aimed at intensifying collaboration between clinicians and researchers.

These courses will use an innovative pedagogical approach, namely Problem Based Learning (PBL) where students learn about a subject by focusing on the steps needed to solve particular problems.

International learning

Epinext aims to reach 30% of international students from medical and scientific fields within the existing Brain Master Program. For this purpose, PBL, clinically oriented Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) and Small Private Online Courses (SPOC) will be set up.

 

Location

    • INS: Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes

      Inserm UMR1106, Université Aix-Marseille

      Faculté de Médecine, 27 Boulevard Jean Moulin

      13005 Marseille, France.

    • Hôpital de la Timone

      264 Rue Saint-Pierre

      13385 Marseille Cedex 5

      France

       

    • Hôpital Nord

      Chemin des Bourrely

      13915 Marseille Cedex 20

      France

    • UNIS: INSERM UMR 1072

      Faculté de Médecine – Secteur Nord, Université Aix-Marseille

      51 Boulevard Pierre Dramard

      13015 Marseille

      France

 

  • INMED: UMR 901

    Parc scientifique de Luminy, 163 Avenue de Luminy

    13273 Marseille Cedex 09

    France

Dr. Gilles Ailleboust
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Dr. Gilles Ailleboust

Grâce à ses relations au sein de la communauté pharmaceutique locale et nationale, il participe actuellement à des conférences internationales sur de nombreux sujets liés à la préparation des médicaments.

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