
Bio
Ranmal Samarasinghe, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician who treats patients with epilepsy, a spectrum of neurological diseases that cause seizures. As a scientist, he uses brain organoids – simplified three-dimensional human brain tissue grown from stem cells – to study how neurons connect to form neural circuits and how circuit dysfunction relates to conditions like autism and epilepsy. Samarasinghe hopes that findings from his research could lead to improved care for patients and ultimately to the creation of therapies for various conditions on the epilepsy spectrum.
Epilepsy currently impacts more than 50 million people around the world, including an estimated one-third of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Currently available antiseizure medications can prevent seizures in roughly two-thirds of epilepsy patients, but the disease remains incurable and all patients typically require lifelong treatment regimens. In collaboration with Bennett Novitch, Samarasinghe is creating brain organoids that mimic the neural circuit abnormalities seen in the brains of patients with epilepsy to model and study how the various forms of this disease impact brain function. This work could reveal why some patients do not respond to current therapies and inform the development of new treatments and cures.
Samarasinghe has demonstrated that these organoids can produce brainwave abnormalities similar to those seen in patients with epilepsy-associated neurological diseases like Rett syndrome or epileptic encephalopathy-13, an epilepsy that primarily occurs in infants. He hopes these modeling advances could one day enable researchers to use induced pluripotent stem cells derived from a patient’s skin cells to create brain organoids that replicate their unique disease. This would allow medical researchers to examine a patient’s abnormal brain rhythms in greater detail and test a number of different therapies to find the best treatment for their condition.
Samarasinghe earned both his doctorate in neuroscience and medical degree at the University of Pittsburgh. He completed an internal medicine internship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and subsequently completed an adult neurology residency and subspecialty fellowship in clinical neurophysiology at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center.
Publications
Transient Muscarinic and Glutamatergic Stimulation of Neural Stem Cells Trigger Acute and Persistent Changes in Differentiation.
Published in Neurobiology of Disease on July 6, 2014
Cooperativity and Complementarity: Synergies in non-classical and classical glucocorticoid signaling
Published in Cell Cycle on August 1, 2012
Nongenomic glucocorticoid receptor action regulates gap junction intercellular communication and neural progenitor cell proliferation
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 4, 2011
Selective inhibition of mitogen-activated protein kinase phosphatases by zinc accounts for extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2- dependent oxidative neuronal cell death
Published in Molecular Pharmacology on July 16, 2008
Induction of an Anti-Inflammatory Cytokine, IL-10, in Dendritic Cells After Toll-like Receptor Signaling
Published in Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research on December 18, 2006
- Identification of neural oscillations and epileptiform changes in human brain organoidsPublished in Nature Neuroscience on Monday, August 23, 2021
Honors & Affiliations
Affiliations
- American Academy of Neurology
- American Clinical Neurophysiology Society
- American Epilepsy Society