Not all cases of epilepsy are the same. Some people suffer a few seizures, begin taking one of 30 or more epilepsy medications available, and live a typical life.

But for about a half million U.S. children with treatment-resistant disease, it’s far worse. Their seizures keep coming, making them more likely to die young. They’re at greater risk for learning problems, social and emotional difficulties, and social isolation.

Many of these epilepsies are caused by genetic mutations. Matthew Weston, a neuroscientist at Virginia Tech's Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, leads a team working to identify them.

In the latest episode of Big Science Small Pod, Weston explains what happens in the brain during seizures and how his lab is researching their genetic roots to help develop new treatments for children.

“My goal,” Weston said, “is to understand this in a way that has an … effect on patient care, focused on making these kids’ lives better.”

Lining the vessels that carry blood and oxygen to your brain, there’s a protective filter than keeps bad stuff from getting out of the bloodstream and into the brain where it can do harm. It’s called the blood-brain barrier. But this feature becomes a problem when doctors need to get chemotherapy to a brain tumor. That protective barrier then stands between cancer and drugs that could treat it.

Physician-scientist Cheng-Chia “Fred” Wu of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute is investigating how to use sound to temporarily open that barrier to allow cancer drugs to reach brain tumors, like those caused by the highly lethal childhood cancer he treats, diffuse midline glioma.

“As a radiation doctor, I point beams to fight cancer. That's what we do. Point and shoot,” Wu said. “Ultrasound is very similar to radiation in many ways … and so when I first learned about it, I just felt that this was a technology that can really be transformative.”

The cerebellum hasn’t gotten much love from brain scientists historically, but neurobiologists today are discovering how it works to control motor functions, and how problems in that brain region cause movement disorders.

Research by ⁠Meike van der Heijden⁠, neurobiologist and assistant professor at the ⁠Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC⁠, has found that disorders like dystonia and tremors are connected to changes in how nerve cells in the cerebellum communicate.

Van der Heijden says the key to understanding what goes wrong in the cerebellum might lie in understanding normal development in children.

“If we understand what is the timeline of that normal development,” she asked, “can we kind of use that to back engineer treatments … in adulthood.”

Sound has been harnessed for uses from medical imaging to SONAR. Now, scientists are exploring how ultrasound can be focused and used to treat conditions as varied as chronic pain, addiction, and cancer. Wynn Legon explains the evolution of focused ultrasound and how his lab is contributing to the growing list of whats the technology can benefit our health.

Wynn Legon is an assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in Roanoke. His lab studies the use of low-intensity focused ultrasound (LIFU). LIFU is an emerging form of noninvasive neuromodulation that uses mechanical energy to affect neuronal activity. The technology combines high spatial resolution with deep focal lengths providing unprecedented non-invasive access to the human brain. The enormous potential of low-intensity focused ultrasound stems from the ability to focus it through the intact skull to a millimeter-sized focal spot virtually anywhere in the brain. This makes it a powerful alternative to both invasive neurosurgical procedures and other non-invasive brain stimulation techniques.

Human beings are mostly water, and about a fifth of that water is interstitial fluid, flowing in the spaces between our cells. ⁠Jenny Munson⁠, a world leader in the study of interstitial fluid flow, explains how fluid flow changes in diseases like brain cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, and how that understanding is being used to improve treatments of those conditions and others.

Munson is a professor and director of ⁠Fralin Biomedical Research Institute's⁠ Cancer Research Center in Roanoke, Virginia. Part of her lab’s research focuses on brain cancer, and how fluid flow increases between cells within the tissue at the edge of the tumor where cancer cells mix with neighboring brain cells and evade typical therapies. Munson and her team believe fluid flow can alter how a tumor responds to drug therapies. The lab is also translating many of its methods and hypotheses to understand the role of fluid flow in immunity, aging, and women's health.

Your heart will beat billions of times, with incredible reliability, if you live a typical lifespan. But a handful of abnormal beats could be fatal. ⁠Steve Poelzing⁠, a groundbreaking cardiovascular scientist, divulges the complex mechanism behind a single heartbeat, how it can go awry, and what his research is discovering about identifying conditions that can disrupt healthy heart rhythms in order to head off fatal arrythmias.

Dr. Poelzing is a professor and associate director of faculty affairs at the ⁠Fralin Biomedical Research Institute⁠. He studies the processes of electrical conductivity between heart muscle cells, the proteins that connect them, and how mutations are linked to sudden cardiac death. He also studies diseases such as heart failure, ischemia, and diabetes. Poelzing's research has demonstrated that the spread of electricity across the heart, which makes it beat, is conducted not only by proteins, but also electrical fields between heart muscle cells, a phenomenon called ephaptic coupling.

A compact guide to the human body and how it works, powered by the world-class scientists of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC.

More than half of the calories consumed in the United States are ultra-processed. At the same time, food-related ailments, including heart disease and diabetes, are on the rise. Yet we struggle to resist foods that are the worst for us.⁠Alex DiFeliceantonio⁠, an assistant professor and interim co-director of the Center for Health Behaviors Research at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, and leader of the DONNUT Lab, investigates our food choices, how what we eat can change our brains, and whether our relationship with food can actually be an addiction. In the inaugural episode of Pocket Science, she explores those questions, and whether we can behave our way out of unhealthy eating when major food manufacturers have so effectively stacked the deck against us.

The DONNUT Lab seeks to understand the basic mechanisms of food choice, by both isolating the properties of foods in our modern food environment to evaluate their effect on physiology, brain function, and brain-physiology interaction, and trying to understand how individual differences in response to these food properties can confer risk or benefit for disease outcomes.