scFLARE leads to a change in clinical practice in humans?  🤯 When we made our calcium integrator scFLARE in 2020 we hoped that it would be used by basic neuroscientists to help dissect neural circuitry but we never imagined that it might lead to a change in clinical practice in humans. A team led by Ivan Soltesz @rmjamiolkowski and @QuynhA_Nguyen at @StanfordMed used scFLARE to discover an unexpected region of the brain that is recruited/activated during epileptic seizures: the fasciola cinereum or FC. The authors showed that optogenetic inhibition of FC led to a striking decrease in seizure duration in mice. In humans with severe recurrent epileptic seizures the standard of care is surgical resection of affected brain regions. In 6 human patients, sEEG measurements showed prominent involvement of the FC region. In one of these patients, when ablation of the amygdala and anterior hippocampus proved insufficient to suppress seizures, the FC was lesioned, leading to a stunning 83% reduction in seizure frequency! From the paper: “Here we used scFLARE in combination with closed-loop optogenetics to identify the FC subregion of the brain as a novel node of seizure propagation and target for intervention in mice and extended these insights to human patients. Critically, our finding that all patients with TLE from whom we obtained recordings had epileptic activity in this area can lead to a fundamental change in the standard of care." Congratulations to the authors on this impressive and impactful work: @QuynhA_Nguyen, our previous scFLARE collaborator; @mateosanchezlab, the original inventor of scFLARE in my lab; @rmjamiolkowski from the Stanford Dept of Neurosurgery; and Ivan Soltesz and his lab members. We are humbled that our tool played some role in this discovery! nature.com/articles/s41591-0…