Driving Innovation: The Epilepsy Therapy Project and its partnership with the Epilepsy Foundation

“Partnership had always been a core value, and we recognized that we needed greater scale and reach to have more significant impact in our mission to accelerate new therapies,” Warren Lammert, Co-founder of the Epilepsy Therapy Project.

The Beginning of the Epilepsy Therapy Project

In 1998, Warren Lammert’s nine-month-old daughter, Sylvie, had her first seizure. As Sylvie went from one therapy to the next without finding an answer, Warren’s family joined the roller coaster ride of different therapies that is so common for those living with epilepsy.

In 2002, Warren Lammert and Orrin Devinsky MD co-founded the Epilepsy Therapy Project (ETP). The goal of ETP is to foster innovation and support scientific advancements that could result in new treatments for people with epilepsy. Most importantly, the purpose is to get new therapies to people with epilepsy faster – in a timeframe that matters!

Forming a Partnership

In 2007, ETP began partnering with the Epilepsy Foundation in providing commercialization grant support to academics and startups. Due to the success of that relationship, in 2012 ETP merged with the Epilepsy Foundation. That merger brought a renewed vigor and focus to the Epilepsy Foundation. Several members of ETP joined the board at the Epilepsy Foundation and pushed for us to support partnerships and to be pragmatic and solution oriented. We need to not only understand the science behind epilepsy but also the roadmap of how that science was going to benefit people in our lifetimes.

“Before Warren Lammert started the Epilepsy Therapy Project, there was little focus on bringing new and better therapies to people with epilepsy in the near term,” said Dr. Jacqueline French, chief medical and innovation officer, Epilepsy Foundation. “He has acted as a major catalyst, not only providing funding (through new therapy grants) to early therapy development projects, but also connecting start-ups to resources and facilitating important research connections. He is directly responsible for a number of new devices and therapies moving forward.”

Current Strategic Objectives

The four strategic objectives of ETP are now incorporated into the Epilepsy Foundation research innovation track, and the objectives remain true to ETP’s intent. These strategic areas include:

1. Promoting partnerships among industry, academia, investors, people impacted by epilepsy and physicians. In 2017, we launched the Epilepsy Innovation Institute (Ei²) that supports higher-risk projects in the epilepsy space that bring together multiple disciplines together to work towards a common goal. Ei² is currently supporting the My Seizure Gauge initiative, a public-private partnership that supports an international team working together to develop a minimally invasive seizure forecasting device. We are actively embedded with the team, ensuring that the voice of our community is involved at all development stages. Imagine if you could forecast a seizure like you could forecast the weather?
2. Providing financial support to advance promising science that could lead to better therapies. We currently provide commercialization grants for later-stage development projects to help accelerate them on the marketplace. To celebrate the many companies that have received support through the Epilepsy Foundation partnership with ETP, watch this video.
3. Fostering innovation and entrepreneurship so novel epilepsy projects and companies can make it to people with epilepsy. We host an annual Epilepsy Foundation Shark Tank Competition to showcase unique solutions on epilepsy products that could transform our community. Judges and the audience vote to provide funds to their favorite pitch. In 2018, we added a pitch perfect component to work with finalists before the competition. These pitches help the finalists develop their market strategy and strategic objectives to ensure a successful product.
4. Providing visibility to therapies and devices in the epilepsy pipeline and increasing attention to the real needs of people with epilepsy and the need for more research efforts. We host an Epilepsy Foundation Pipeline Conference that showcases therapies from preclinical to right before U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. Our next conference will be March 12-13, 2020, in Santa Clara, California. In 2019, we revamped our pipeline tracker tool to allow people to search the catalogue of products currently in development. During our soft launch phase to test the tool, there have already been over 5,000 users searching the site.

Warren’s leadership has always been on building up collaborations, being solution-oriented and focusing on the pragmatic. Partnerships are at the core of this philosophy because we cannot do it alone. Thank you, Warren, for sharing your vision.