Eliza Moore

PhD student, Neuroscience

Supervisors: Professor Patrick Kwan, Dr Ben Rollo, Dr Jinchao Gu, Dr Lauren May (MIPS), Professor Terence O’Brien.

What I’m Working On: A new hope for people with drug-resistant epilepsy

You know when you've got the toaster, kettle and dishwasher all running at the same time, and then the power cuts out? Thankfully, that's your circuit breaker kicking in and preventing the kitchen from catching fire.

Our brains contain billions of cells called neurons, which, much like the wires in your kitchen, communicate through electricity. These neurons fire in a highly synchronised fashion, but sometimes things go wrong and some neurons fire uncontrollably.

We don't have an inbuilt circuit breaker, so we don't switch off (on the other hand, thankfully, we don't catch fire either). However, this electrical overload can lead to uncontrolled muscle movements, absences and often complete loss of consciousness, with life-threatening consequences: these are epileptic seizures.

Around 50 million people worldwide live with epilepsy. The standard treatment is anti-seizure medications taken daily to prevent the excess electrical activity. But for one in three patients, these drugs don't work, partly because most of them target the same parts of the brain's electrical system.

So we need new drugs with new mechanisms to give us a better chance at treating a broader range of patients. The closest thing our brains have to a circuit breaker is a molecule called Adenosine. This builds up in our brains at night to help us sleep. During a seizure, adenosine levels rise to slow the brain down, and this helps to bring the seizure to an end.

But it's all too little, too late. To stick with the kitchen analogy, the curtains are already on fire,

“Eliza's research will play a crucial role in demonstrating the efficacy of novel drugs in human stem cell models prior to their advancement into animal studies and, ultimately, clinical trials.”

- Dr Ben Rollo.

At the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, researchers are developing a new drug that aims to boost the brain's response to adenosine. These are called A1R PAMS, and they're being designed to step into action only when needed, cranking up the brain's inbuilt circuit breaker and preventing the seizures altogether.

Animal studies can tell us a lot, but to really understand how these drugs work in people, we want to look closer to home, and this is where my project comes in. I test these A1R PAMS in human neurons. I do this by taking human skin or blood cells and turning them into stem cells, cells capable of becoming any other cell type.

I turn these into neurons, creating a living model of the human brain in a dish. I grow these neurons on plates that have electrodes lining the bottom of the wells. This gives me a live visualisation of the electrical activity of these neurons: I can see how they fire and how they behave. And I can actually give these neurons seizures by adding convulsants - but when I add the A1R PAMS, there are no seizures. In other words, the drug is working, cranking up the brain's inbuilt circuit breaker, adenosine.

These results are very promising: the drug is effectively preventing seizures in human neurons, providing a better option, and a potentially life-changing option for the one in three patients who continue to have seizures, despite the current treatments available.

*This story is based on Eliza’s winning 2025 Three-Minute Thesis presentation.