Development of a Drosophila-based platform to replace and reduce animal experimentation in epilepsy research

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Epilepsy is a devastating disorder of the nervous system that affects 1 in 100 people and poses a heavy burden of patients, relatives and the NHS. While some anti-epileptic medicines exist, they do not work for all patients and they only keep the symptoms at minimum level, without being able to cure the disease.There are several causes of epilepsy, and scientists are beginning to understand rare forms of epilepsy that are hereditary and are associated with other disorders of sleep and movement. While each single case is rare, altogether hereditary epilepsies are a big portion of the total epileptic population.Hereditary epilepsies are due to mutation in genes and scientists need to study these genes in small animals to understand how they work and cause epilepsy. This is often done in mice, however studying genes in mice is slow, expensive and affects the welfare of these animals, often without a positive result at the end.We propose here to develop methods and instruments that will allow us and other scientists to use a small insect, the fruit fly, in place of mice to study epilepsy genes. The fruit fly has been of great help in understanding how genes work for over 100 years and 70% of human genes are conserved in this organism. Studying epilepsy genes in the fruitfly first will allow to study more genes, to study them faster and to identify the most important genes that may be eventually studied in a reduced number of mice. This will beneficial both for patients and for the welfare of the mice.