Clinical advances in investigational epilepsy treatments.

Introduction: Although innovative ways of treating epilepsy that is resistant to standard therapy are actively being researched, not many have demonstrated sufficient efficacy and safety in clinical research to obtain marketing authorization.

Areas covered: The article aims to provide a concise overview of the most important investigational treatments for epilepsy that have achieved breakthroughs in clinical studies in terms of efficacy and safety. Relevant studies published between 2020 and 2025 were searched for in PubMed and Google Scholar databases, without language restrictions.

Expert opinion: Although the first clinical breakthroughs have been achieved in the causal therapy of epilepsy using cell therapy and antisense oligonucleotides, larger clinical and observational studies are needed after the wider application of these therapeutic methods to evaluate their true place in epilepsy therapy. Symptomatic antiseizure medication has achieved significantly greater success in clinical practice by acting through several different mechanisms, and in the future, the reduction of the number of patients who will not respond favorably to any form of antiseizure medication could be expected.