Associate Director HESI Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Understanding the risk of drug-induced seizures is critical to ensuring safe and effective medicines. Animal models used to detect drug-induced seizures often lack sensitivity, translatability to humans and are used in later stages of drug development when it’s generally too late for better lead selection or medicinal chemistry changes. Emerging methods utilizing in vitro cell-based, microelectrode array (MEA) assays have shown promise in identifying proconvulsant risk assessment earlier in drug discovery. The Health and Environmental Science Institute (HESI) NeuTox Consortium organized a multi-site study to explore optimization of the MEA models using rodent and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell-derived neurons. The results highlight the ability to discriminate between proconvulsant and control compounds as well as important characterization of the method.
