Oran Knowlson, a 13-year-old Briton, underwent an innovative operation last October at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, in partnership with University College London, King’s College Hospital and the University of Oxford. Suffering from Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, a form of epilepsy resistant to treatment, since he was 3 years old, Oran had until then lived in a whirlwind of daily seizures, sometimes several hundred per day. As recounted The Guardian Monday June 24, 2024, these uncontrollable crises seriously compromised his quality of life and his safety.
The intervention consisted of implanting the Picostim neurostimulator, developed by the British company Amber Therapeutics, under his skull. The device, which takes the form of a square 3.5 cm long and 0.6 cm thick, was placed with millimeter precision in the thalamus of Oran’s brain, integrating a specially designed cranial slot . It is rechargeable via wearable headphones and continuously delivers mild electrical stimulation to block the electrical circuits responsible for seizures.
Soon a complete study
According to the doctors responsible for the operation, this neurostimulator would have reduced the teenager’s daytime seizures by 80%. An observation shared by his mother, who highlights a clear improvement in her daily life. “He is much more talkative, he is more engaged. He’s 13 and I definitely have a teenagershe says. The future looks bright, something I wouldn’t have thought of saying six months ago.”.
The pilot trial now plans to recruit three additional patients with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, with the aim of including 22 participants for a full study. “Deep brain stimulation brings us closer than ever to stopping seizures in patients who have very limited effective treatment options”, enthuses Martin Tisdall, pediatric neurosurgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital. The objective is to constitute a relevant database in order to « demonstrate the ability of deep brain stimulation to treat pediatric epilepsy ».
