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10 Headlines A ssociate Professor Caroline Beck is a scientist whose personal experience of having a child with epilepsy has helped to shape the direction of her research. "My son appeared normal at birth, but subtle signs hinted at underlying issues," she reflects. “In the UK, where he was born, you have tests at your GP at about six weeks of age. He was flagged as being a little bit slow to fix and follow with his eyes, and his head circumference wasn’t growing at the rate it should.” Her son started having small seizures, which in a very young baby can easily be mistaken for a startle reflex. “At about five months old, he had a full-blown tonic-clonic seizure, which in an infant is absolutely horrific.” Her son was diagnosed with ‘infantile spasms’, leaving him severely disabled and unable to care for himself. As a mother, Caroline wanted to provide a ‘fix’, if not for her son, then at least for others. However, as a developmental biologist with a PhD in molecular genetics, her field of expertise didn’t lend itself to the disease. “I had an interest in the development of amphibians, in particular how tadpoles regenerate limbs and tails, and there was no obvious connection to epilepsy,” she says. In 2004, Caroline moved her family from the UK to New Zealand to join the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago Dunedin, establishing a lab to study the development and regeneration in the African clawed frog Xenopus. Then, by 2018, genome sequencing of children with epilepsy worldwide was starting to show a different picture. Many early onset epilepsy conditions in infants and young children were found to have a genetic cause. “It became clear that many of these genes were involved in brain development, and suddenly we had a means of contributing to the research.” Caroline set about adapting the tadpoles as a model for epilepsy. Around the same time, she crossed paths with Professor Lynette Sadlier, an epilepsy and genetics researcher and paediatric neurologist. Lynette invited Caroline’s son to take part in a clinical trial aimed at evaluating the use of a drug applied to the skin to reduce seizures in children like her son. From zoology Associate Professor Caroline Beck is driven by her own connection to severe infant epilepsy