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Ramblings from the Bench and Bedside: A Week in the Life of an Epilepsy Clinician Scientist

Welcome to the column.  Every couple of months, I will draw from my experiences as an Epilepsy clinician, scientist or educator, to provide epilepsy.com readers with some thoughts about recent advances on our understanding and treatment of Epilepsy.   Let me give you an example of the various activities that epilepsy researchers undertake in order to find new treatments.   I started  a hectic week of traveling by attending a study section of the National Institute of Health (NIH), where scientists meet to rank research proposals.  Study sections allow the NIH to select the most meritorious ideas for funding and provide feedback and ideas on how to improve the unfunded proposals.  Personally, I attend three of these grueling sessions every year, requiring a major commitment of time, but they are critical to the field of epilepsy.  In a future column, I will describe in greater detail what goes on behind the closed doors and why this process is essential to epilepsy research.

During this same week, I participated as a voting member to an advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where we considered the safety of intravenous preparations of Phenytoin and Fosphenytoin.   The proceedings, presentations, and transcription of the hearing will become public knowledge in a few weeks and they will be available online.  In another future column, I will describe the process of deliberations of FDA advisory panels to provide you with a greater understanding of why the FDA does things in a certain way.   Before I was a participant of these review groups, I saw them as cryptic proceedings with no clear reason for their pronouncements.  Although the outcome of their deliberations are public, the rationale for decisions seems  at times as inscrutable as a Papal Conclave or as clear as Delphi’s Oracles.   I hope to offer the readers of this column, a glimpse about the process of their deliberations and improve your understanding on why drug packaging language reads in a particular manner.   These decisions play a major role on the marketing and utilization of epilepsy drugs and devices.  

Rounding out this week, I  lectured at the 2nd North American Regional Caribbean Epilepsy Congress in Kingston, Jamaica, where I was one of the witnesses of the creation of Regional chapter of the International League against Epilepsy (ILAE) that encompasses the successful Jamaican chapter but broadens its horizons as there are almost a dozen of other English-speaking Island countries who can’t form  an International League Against Epilepsy ( ILAE) chapter by themselves, but together, they can work in unison to improve the care of people with Epilepsy on these islands.   A future column will explore these and other successful efforts to improve the care of Epilepsy across the globe.  It is a privilege to be able to share my insights with you over the coming year.

 

Click here for part 2: AES Preview

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