PhD candidate’s epilepsy research helps uncover insights for optimizing treatment

June 30, 2026 — New advances in epilepsy research may soon allow doctors to better predict which patients will benefit from deep brain stimulation and personalize their treatment.

PhD candidate Xinbing (Jack) Zhang was part of a clinical trial team that identified a specific neural biomarker in patients with epilepsy treated with deep brain stimulation that correlates with successful treatment outcomes. The research was recently published in Epilepsia and earned Zhang the top clinical science poster prize at the American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery biennial conference this spring.

Zhang is part of the Neural Netoff Lab led by Professor Tay Netoff and is co-advised by Dr. Robert McGovern, a functional neurosurgeon and Associate Professor of the University of Minnesota Medical School.

The challenge: Inconsistent outcomes

Epilepsy affects approximately 3 million adults in the United States. For the nearly one-third of patients who continue to experience seizures despite medication, surgically implanting a deep brain stimulation device to stimulate the anterior nucleus of the thalamus is a critical treatment option.

However, the therapy's success has historically been inconsistent. One challenge is that clinicians lack objective tools to predict who will benefit from the surgery or how to optimize and personalize treatment after implantation.

Discovery of the "SGO" biomarker

The research team discovered a specific brain signal that may eliminate this guesswork.

The team identified a neural biomarker known as a slow gamma oscillation (SGO; 20-50 Hz), recorded directly from the thalamus using the implanted deep brain stimulation device. The presence of this signal heavily dictates clinical success.

In a cohort study of 11 patients, six out of the seven individuals who exhibited an SGO biomarker experienced a clinically meaningful response to therapy (defined as a greater than 50% reduction in seizures). Conversely, none of the patients who lacked the SGO biomarker responded to the treatment.

Follow-up data presented at the American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery biennial conference demonstrated that the strength of this biomarker early in therapy strongly correlated with clinical outcomes one year later.

Researchers validated the biomarker's relevance to epilepsy by confirming a direct relationship between SGOs and abnormal epileptic activity in a separate cohort of patients undergoing invasive monitoring.

Shifting toward personalized medicine

What makes this discovery uniquely promising for clinical translation is that the SGO signal is tracked using the FDA-approved deep brain stimulation device already inside the patient. This eliminates the need for additional, invasive surgeries.

The research reveals that effective brain stimulation acutely suppresses these SGO signals during clinical testing, and this suppression grows stronger over time in patients who show improvement.

This raises the possibility that the biomarker could serve multiple roles:

• Screening: Identifying likely responders early on, potentially sparing non-responders from unnecessary intracranial surgeries.
• Optimization: Allowing doctors to immediately fine-tune and personalize stimulation parameters for each individual.
• Tracking: Providing a real-time, objective metric to track therapeutic benefits over time, replacing months of uncertain waiting with data-driven medicine.

The research team is now applying for funding to conduct a multicenter clinical trial to see whether SGOs can be used for some of these roles including screening and creating personalized stimulation settings. The team is hopeful that this will lead to long-term changes in how epilepsy patients are treated in order to improve seizure outcomes and quality of life in these individuals.