Current surgical therapies for epilepsy, such as brain resection, laser ablation, and neurostimulation, target epileptic networks on macroscopic scales, without directly correcting the circuit-level aberrations responsible for seizures. The transplantation of inhibitory cortical interneurons represents a novel neurobiological method for modifying recipient neural circuits in a physiologically corrective manner.
In this review, published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, Duke Neurosurgery's Stephen Harward, MD, PhD, and Derek Southwell, MD, PhD, describe pre-clinical studies of interneuron transplantation in animal epilepsy models and discuss its potential use as a clinical therapy for epilepsy.