Professor Chen Zhong's research team recently made a breakthrough in the study of epilepsy drug treatment strategies. The team published a research paper titled "Nanoengineered on-demand drug delivery system improves the efficacy of pharmacotherapy for epilepsy" in Science Advances, a sub-journal of Science. The first author is Dr. Wu Di, an associate researcher at ZCMU, and the co-first author is Fei Fan, a doctoral student at Zhejiang University. Prof. Chen Zhong and Researcher Wang Yi of ZCMU are the co-corresponding authors of this paper. This study was also supported and assisted by Prof. Fang Wenjun of Zhejiang University and Prof. Xie Hujun of Zhejiang Gongshang University.

Epilepsy is a common neurological disease with a global prevalence of about 0.7%, of which there are more than 10 million patients in China. Due to the uncertainty of seizure timing, most patients need to take antiepileptic drugs for a long time at regular intervals. This not only leads to increased toxic side effects but makes about 30% of epilepsy patients develop tolerance to antiepileptic drugs and become refractory epilepsy (also known as drug-resistant epilepsy). Therefore, how to increase the effective concentration of drugs in the epileptic focal area with the lowest drug dose and improve the efficacy has become a key scientific problem in Epilepsy drug research.

Aiming at the disease characteristics of abnormal brain discharge during seizures, this study utilizes multidisciplinary technology, designs an electric field-sensitive nano-drug delivery system with combined brain targeting capability for the precise delivery of antiepileptic drugs and provides a new strategy for epilepsy drug treatment. It is worth noting that the proposed drug delivery system has no significant toxic side effects and has high biosafety after various acute and chronic long-term drug delivery tests.

It is reported that Science Advances is a main open source journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a sub-journal of Science magazine. First published in 2015, it is a comprehensive and authoritative scientific journal covering all academic fields and is highly recognized both domestically and internationally as a CAS Top Ranking journal.