Epilepsy together with epileptic comorbidities is severe neurological disorder with crucial impact on patients` life, patients` family and society. Epilepsy often results from the epileptogenic insult. This insult initiates the epileptogenic process associated with variety of molecular, cellular and structural changes in the brain. Better understanding of these processes enables identification of biomarkers suitable for inspection and development of novel therapeutic and diagnostic approaches aiming to prevent the epilepsy and epileptic comorbidities. Despite the substantial progress in this area, the distinct processes leading to epilepsy (epileptogenesis) are not completely understood. Recent studies have shown the association between alterations in microRNA (miRNA/miR) expression and pathophysiological changes in epileptic patients and animal models of epilepsy. Hence, miRNAs are suitable candidates for potential biomarkers of epileptogenesis. Project “miRNA as biomarker of mesial temporal lobe epilepsy” will address the alterations in miRNA expression in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) patients, which is the most frequent subtype of epilepsy. To find potential new biomarkers of MTLE the miRNA profile of hippocampal tissue and plasma will be analyzed by novel highly sensitive method miQPCR. Additionally, miRNA editing will be addressed.

Results

1 conference abstract: Identification of miRNA expression profiles in human mesial temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis (12 European Congress on Epileptology)

1 invited lecture: Methodical approaches to PCR based quantification of miRNA in epilepsy (12 European Congress on Epileptology)

1 manuscript submitted 19.12.2016 for publication in impacted journal Epilepsia: MicroRNA and mesial temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis: whole miRNome profiling of human hippocampus (under revision)

Publications