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On 8 February, 2021, we celebrated International Epilepsy Day, to raise awareness on a condition that affects 60 million individuals across the globe. The success of this campaign on a yearly basis is a small victory for all those who dedicate their lives to promoting this cause.

But these small victories should not deter us from the fact that more research is desperately needed to understand more about the condition; they should act as a boost to keep going.

“Our work on epilepsy is never really complete … there’s always more to figure out”, says Prof. Giuseppe Di Giovanni, Professor at the Department of Physiology & Biochemistry within the Faculty of Medicine & Surgery.

Prof. Di Giovanni moved from Cardiff University in September 2009, when he joined the University of Malta as an Associate Professor. In 2013, he was promoted to Professor.

“It seems like it was a long time ago, but my academic work and the research have given me a great deal of satisfaction and the time has flown very quickly”, he said.

Newspoint interviewed him to understand more about his journey to UM and how epilepsy became one of his main research interests.

Can you tell us a little bit about your other professional roles, even international ones?

Thanks to the support of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, I have managed to raise my international profile and today I am very proud to represent Malta as the President of an international society, the Mediterranean Neuroscience Society with their headquarter in Bordeaux, France.

As President, I lead a Council consisting of 14 international scholars to increase neuroscience collaboration and networking between Mediterranean countries with particular emphasis on helping young neuroscientists, who are the future, our future. Our next conference will be in Croatia in 2022. It has had to be postponed due to COVID-19 and we are still hoping that a face-to-face conference will be possible.

I am also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Neuroscience Methods, published by Elsevier. This is an important and delicate job that I do with maximum care. Every day of the year, I take decisions on the research output of many colleagues with the help of the amazing team of world-renowned scientists who are part of the journal Editorial Board. On average, the journal receives about 1,000 articles and we have a rejection rate of 65%.

I am an Honorary Professor of Neuroscience at Cardiff University, a position that has given me the opportunity to continue and consolidate my internationally standing in the field. International collaboration and researcher mobility are crucial in research, especially at these difficult times of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have to thank MCST who has supported my collaboration with foreign partners through the Internationalisation Partnership Awards Scheme (IPAS) in the last eight years.

What research are you working on at present?

Currently, my research group is working on two exciting projects on Absence Epilepsy, one on the role of serotonin, which was initially funded by UM Research Excellence Fund in 2020, and the second on the role of cannabinoids which has just received funding from MCST as one of the Research Excellence Programmes.

The aim of both projects is to move from targeting control of symptoms to strategies for prevention and cure of this neurological disease.

You’re also quite a prolific author of many research articles that have been published in prestigious journals, including Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience and Brain. What has been an exciting piece of research you’ve published?

Without any doubt, it would have to be my publication in Nature Medicine in December 2009 , the most common type of childhood epilepsy.

It was an incredible adventure that lasted a few years and involved 3 different revisions by the journals and many new experiments.

I still remember the feeling of reward and happiness when we received the final acceptance. This has given me the strength to go further and answer new questions to help people with epilepsy who started to contact me for hope on new therapies.

Something that has already been discovered is that antiepileptic drugs are not antiepileptic as such, but anti-seizures. What alternative medications or treatment would you suggest?

Unfortunately, the number of medications that a clinician has available to treat epilepsy is relatively modest if we compared it with other disorders. We still use clinical drugs that are 50 years old.

This is due to a complex situation, first, big pharma is not investing in research and development since the number of people with epilepsy is relatively small, also, epilepsy is not a single disease but a disorder including many types of conditions with different pathological scenarios. This has hindered discovery and new treatments, and today we still can only stop seizures, but we cannot cure the disease.

Regarding advice about alternative treatments, I would be very careful. When seizures continue to re-occur even with medication, other treatment options such as surgery, stimulation of the vagus nerve, especially in children, the ketogenic diet may be considered.

Any consideration given to complementary therapies should be thoroughly researched and discussed with the treating doctor.

What is your message about the general opinion that more research needs to be done to understand this condition?

It is now accepted that epilepsy is not just seizures, people with epilepsy suffer from debilitating neuropsychiatric comorbidities also aggravated by the current antiepileptic drugs that have a negative outcome on the patients and their families’ lives.

My group is focused on epilepsy with a holistic approach, we want to treat both seizures and comorbidities and serotonin and cannabinoids may offer new hope.

More research is desperately needed, and the more awareness we raise to raise vital funds for this research on epilepsy, the better.