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For people with severe epilepsy, no medication is effective – but a radical approach of implanting stem cells into the brain could stop seizures at their source.
The technique, which has so far shown promise in rats, would involve taking some of a patient’s own skin cells and turning them into embryonic-like stem cells in the lab. These can then be directed to become a kind of brain cell that damps down seizures.
Epilepsy arises when there is an imbalance between two different kinds of nerve cell in the brain; excitatory ones, which cause other cells to …