Cenobamate as a Promising Treatment for Patients With Epilepsy: William E. Rosenfeld, MD, FAAN, FAES

WATCH TIME: 6 minutes

"People often think in the beginning when a drug like cenobamate comes out, they say ‘we use it on our worst of the worst patients.’ While it does great on those patients, it does even better on the less intractable patients. In other words, the patients who have 1 or 2 seizures a month or 1 every three months, are the ones we can get even higher numbers. They’ll do great on the very intractable, but you’d probably do almost twice as well for that group of patients.”

In November 2019, cenobamate (Xcopri; SK Life Science) was FDA-approved as a medication for partial-onset seizures and since has received a lot of attention in the clinical field of epilepsy. The treatment, a sodium channel antagonist, had its safety and efficacy assessed and confirmed in 2 previous pivotal trials: Study 013 (NCT01397968) and Study 017 (NCT01866111). Since the completion of those trials, the profile of cenobamate has expanded with further analyses from these studies.

Recently, at the 2023 American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Annual Meeting, April 22-27, in Boston, Massachusetts, investigators presented additional research highlighting the therapeutic. In total, SK Life Science presented 10 abstracts, including post-hoc analyses on the rate of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) and drug load in adults with partial-onset (focal) seizures taking cenobamate tablets.¹

William E. Rosenfeld, MD, FAAN, FAES, neurologist from the Comprehensive Epilepsy Care Center for Children and Adults, in St. Louis, Missouri,recently sat down with NeurologyLive® in an interview to speak about the latest research on cenobamate that was presented during the meeting. He talked briefly about the 3 studies that he coauthored, as well as the significance of cenobamate’s impact on seizure. Rosenfeld also spoke about the importance of defined daily dose for patients and other critical factors observed in the study.

Click here for more coverage on AAN 2023.

REFERENCES
1. Latest XCOPRI® (cenobamate tablets) CV Post-hoc Analysis Presented at the 75th American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting. News Release. SK Life Science. Published April 17, 2023. Accessed May 2, 2023. https://www.sklifescienceinc.com/pdf/AAN_SKLSI_Press_Release.pdf