C2I 2024 Healthcare & Medical winner: The Children’s Adaptive Deep brain stimulation for Epilepsy Trial (CADET)

Category: Healthcare & Medical
Project: The Children’s Adaptive Deep brain stimulation for Epilepsy Trial (‘CADET’)
Partners: Department of Neurosurgery, Great Ormond Street Hospital with Amber Therapeutics Ltd, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford; Medical Research Council Brain Network Dynamics Unit, University of Oxford; Department of Basic and Clinical Neuroscience, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London

Last year, UK clinicians hailed a potentially huge breakthrough in the treatment of childhood epilepsy, with the news that a clinical trial of a pioneering brain implant had apparently transformed the life of a British teenager suffering from one of the severest forms of the illness. 

According to initial reports, since having the device fitted in October 2023 at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, thirteen-year-old Oran Knowlson (who suffers from a hitherto treatment resistant form of epilepsy known as Lennox-Gastaut syndrome) has seen an 80 per cent reduction in daytime seizures, which previously sometimes occurred hundreds of times a day and required frequent hospitalization.