As part of our Meet the Moment initiative, Protecting Our Progress Awards provide emergency support to researchers facing immediate threats to their work due to federal funding uncertainty and policy-related constraints, helping ensure critical epilepsy research continues uninterrupted.
In this project, PrevEp, a biotech start up, is developing a nasal spray antiseizure medication, seletracetam, for treatment of cluster seizures and prevention of predictable seizures, for instance seizures triggered by sleep deprivation, stress, fever or menstrual cycles, or induced by stimuli such as flickering light.
Nasal spray gets into the brain much faster than tablets, and is ideal for acute treatment or prevention of seizures at home, school or anywhere out of hospital. Two nasal spray antiseizure medications are already available, Valtoco and Nayzilam, but they are both benzodiazepines which have the potential for sedation, breathing problems and addiction and abuse.
Seletracetam is a second generation of Keppra, 100x more potent than Keppra. This allows a therapeutic dose to fit into the very small volume (0.1 milliliters) of the nasal cavity. It gets into the brain ultrafast, and does not have the limitations of benzodiazepines. Tablets were very well tolerated.
The research team applied for a grant for this project to the NIH under its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR), but it was pulled by the NIH because of Chinese ownership of a company that was contracted to do part of the project, animal toxicity studies. The grant could then not be resubmitted for 1 year because of the government NIH-SBIR program shut down. This CURE Epilepsy grant will allow the team to do the crucial animal toxicity study and thus continue the project while they resubmit the grant to the NIH now that the SBIR program is open again.
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