Australian Epilepsy Project (AEP) 2022 round up

As 2022 draws to a close we reflect on the busy year we've had at the Australian Epilepsy Project (AEP) and the milestones we've achieved.

From Pilot Study to Main Study

We navigated a successful pilot study with 150 participants across three epilepsy cohorts:

• First seizure
• Newly diagnosed epilepsy
• Pharmacoresistant Focal epilepsy

Now with ethics and governance approval to move to a main study, we are recruiting further participants and beginning a national AEP hub rollout.

Since July we have recruited 89 participants to the main study and are looking to enrol more participants. We are also inviting people who were part of our pilot study to join the main study.

Our goal is to change the lives of people living with epilepsy, creating a deeper understanding of epilepsy and how to treat it.

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The first AEP Conference

We held the first AEP Conference in October, with attendees from the research and medtech communities whose research and work focus on epilepsy and brain health.

Digital health and the medtech landscape, digital trends in research, lessons learned from the AEP pilot, the cost of epilepsy, and machine learning were just a few of the topics covered on the day.

We are looking forward to the AEP conference becoming a key date in the research and medtech industry calendars.

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AEP Represents

We flew the AEP flag at several national and international epilepsy conferences including Epilepsy Society of Australia’s (ESA) 36th Annual Scientific meeting in Adelaide and the American Epilepsy Society (AES) Annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. Both conferences offered a great opportunity to spread the word about the AEP and the work we are doing within the field of epilepsy and brain health.

Members of the AEP team also had some wonderful achievements, including AEP Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lead and neuroscientist, Mangor Pedersen, who has been promoted to Associate Professor at Auckland University ofTechnology.

Dr Remika Mito, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Epilepsy and Imaging Division,AEP, was awarded a Victorian Prize for Science and Innovation Victorian Fellowship from veski in addition to an AFRAN award (Australian-French Association for Research and Innovation), which together will support a four-month study mission to UCL in the UK and University of Bordeaux in France.

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