MICHAEL-PREIS

[Laudatio nur in englischer Sprache verfügbar]

By that, the merits of the aforementioned scientists in the field of experimental epileptology are honoured. The prize-winning investigations are dealing with two complexes of topics.

On the one hand, they developed an animal-experimental model of drug-resistant epilepsy. This model gives the opportunity to study the elementary mechanisms underlying drug resistance more in detail and provides the chance to find new antiepileptic drugs which might offer advantages for treatment of epileptic patients who did not respond to currently available antiepileptic medications.

On the other hand investigations are presented which are devoted to the suppression of epileptic activity by a blockade of the transmission of excitation at the glutamate synapse. From that it can be assumed that epileptogenesis increases the susceptibility of the brain to adverse effects of competitive antagonists of the glutamate subreceptor sensitive to N-methyl-D-aspartate and thus reduces the therapeutic window of such compounds.

As a whole, the results elaborated by the group of scientists represent an outstanding progress in epileptology and, without doubt, they will be trend-setting in the next years.