Giving Compass' Take:

· According to Lindsay Kurs at On the Pulse, a new drug trial of an experimental therapy known as Nab-rapamycin at Seattle Children's Hospital has sparked hope for treatment-resistant epilepsy.

· How was Nab-rapamycin designed differently to target mTOR? What can donors do to help expedite this drug trial? 

· Here's how philanthropists can make an impact on epilepsy. 

For the first time in his life, Shanahan “Shanny” Dameral, 19, has a girlfriend. Soon, he’ll be graduating with a high school diploma and looking for his first job on the Kitsap Peninsula.

What seems routine for many is a big deal for Dameral and other children living with treatment-resistant or intractable epilepsy. For reasons largely unknown, seizures in this subset of children persist long past their discovery in early childhood despite being treated with multiple medications and undergoing surgery to remove the affected parts of their brain.

Diagnosed with epilepsy at age 5, life for Dameral has always come with seizures attached. When his seizures returned after a second brain surgery shortly after his 16th birthday, his mom Linley Allen, hoped for a medical breakthrough.

“We needed to find something else since another surgery was out of the question,” Allen said. “We had heard about a drug being studied for a more severe seizure condition. I kept holding onto hope that it might be expanded to treat Shanny’s type of seizures because it was all we had at the time.”

Read the full article about hope for treatment-resistant epilepsy by Lindsay Kurs at On the Pulse.