The vast majority of people with epilepsy are overwhelmingly treated with no knowledge of their genomic makeup. However, the future of medicine would seem to lie in the ability to more accurately target epilepsy treatment based upon knowledge of a person’s genome. This is commonly referred to as precision medicine, personalised medicine, or genomic medicine.

As a Genome Scientist, I have spent my career working on the human genome. I am also the parent of two young children who, unfortunately, both suffered brain damage during birth and have severe cerebral palsy. My daughter also developed a rare and catastrophic form of epilepsy at 8 months, called West syndrome, or infantile spasms.