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.

When scientists and clinicians write research papers, we have to do it in a very particular way, using technical words and following strict ways of working. However, this isn’t particularly helpful for most people with epilepsy who want to read about the research into their condition, but don’t necessarily know all of the technical terms!

First and foremost, I am mum to my 18-year-old twins, Will and Ella. Will has had seizures since day 4 of his life and it wasn’t until he was 14 that we found out that he had a rare genetic epilepsy called SCN2A2. I’m also Founder of SCN2A Australia3, Co-Founder of Genetic Epilepsy Team Australia (GETA)4, and on the Leadership Council for Global Genes5.