EpiXchange II

EpiXchange II is a follow up meeting of the EpiXchange conference held in Brussels on 23 May 2018 which brought together the excellence of epilepsy research in Europe. The main goal was to showcase major findings from seven large European Epilepsy research projects, discuss the main bottlenecks and recommendations to move forward and to bring research results closer to clinical application.

EpiXchange II invites the seven Epilepsy research projects together again to review progress in the field in terms of breakthroughs, challenges and future direction of Epilepsy research across Europe. EpiXchange II also invites the members of the EPI-CLUSTER consortium to join in the conference processing's.

EPI-CLUSTER (https://www.ebra.eu/existing-clusters/) was funded by EBRA in late 2019 as a two-year networking action to enhance the coordination of epilepsy research in Europe.

The primary objective of EPICLUSTER is to establish a collaborative framework for the coordinated actions of epilepsy research in Europe, based around shared partnerships and research priorities. Key objectives are:

• Maintaining the cooperation started under EpiXchange that brought together several large-scale epilepsy research projects and bring in new partnerships/projects and stakeholders.

• Agree shared priorities and work toward addressing these including in the area of (1) data sharing (large scale sequencing, preclinical, clinical data), (2) preclinical studies and improving translation, (3) access and sharing of research infrastructures and training.

• Develop and pursue funding of joint research programmes of scale in Europe and beyond.

A series of four events will be run during the two-year period. Event 1: Consensus workshop with leadership and key stakeholders (held on 17th June 2020), Event 2 is the EPI-CLUSTER conference, (EpiXchange II), Event 3 is on a sustainability and policy forum and the final event is the EPI-CLUSTER synthesis forum.