CHICAGO ― Antonio Delgado-Escueta, MD, PhD, will be presented with the 2024 Founders Award during the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Epilepsy Society (AES). One of the most prestigious awards given by the Society, the Founders Award, established in 1966, recognizes members who have a record of lifetime contributions and accomplishments related to epilepsy. The award is funded by the AES Lennox and Lombroso Trust.
Dr. Delgado-Escueta has dedicated the past 60 years to improving care and advancing cures for epilepsies. His published papers and books chart his career as a physician-scientist in neurology and epileptology, primarily at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA).
Dr. Delgado-Escueta’s career is marked by numerous groundbreaking achievements that have had a global impact on research and patient care. In 1969, he was awarded funds to establish one of the first inpatient epilepsy monitoring units after he and a student built a functional video-electroencephalography (EEG) radiotelemetry system. In 1972, his students used this video-radiotelemetry to separate the semiologies of temporal from frontal psychomotor seizures. In 1982, he published the first minute-by-minute protocol for treating status epilepticus in the New England Journal of Medicine. While he was criticized during an NIH/VA site visit for proposing that epilepsies are genetic molecular diseases that can be cured in 1969, he, along with his students and collaborators, has identified genetic variants linked to various epilepsies. These include remitting childhood absence (GABRb3), drug sensitive juvenile myoclonic epilepsies (JME) (EFHC1 and ICK), drug-resistant juvenile myoclonic epilepsies (IPO8, PROSER1 and MYOFERLIN) and Lafora progressive myoclonic epilepsy (EPM2A/DSP and EPM2B/NHLRC1).
His collaborative work continues with the Lafora Epilepsy Cure Initiative and GENetics of the EpilepsieS (GENESS) Consortium to find cures for Lafora epilepsies and drug-resistant juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, respectively.