SAN DIEGO (Ivanhoe Newswire) – More than 3 million Americans suffer from epilepsy.

Not knowing when or if a seizure will strike can make life difficult.

Most people can take medications to control it, but up to 30% of people who have epilepsy don’t respond to drug therapy.

An experimental cell therapy is aimed at eliminating seizures without medication or invasive brain surgery. A new clinical trial is using a regenerative brain cell procedure to stop seizures.

Dr. Sharona Ben-Haim, a neurosurgeon at University of California San Diego Health, said, “Our goal, there, is to, actually, achieve seizure freedom.”

Standard epilepsy treatment begins with medications, then removal of the parts of the brain causing the seizures. But, there is a risk of damaging healthy brain tissue.

Doctors at UC San Diego are using MRI guidance to pinpoint the exact area causing the seizures; then, cells derived from stem cells are injected.

Dr. Jerry Shih, a neurologist and the director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at UC San Diego Health, said, “This therapy offers us the opportunity to not destroy tissue, but to, actually, rehabilitate it and recover it.”

The first patient they treated was a 38-year-old man who had five to eight seizures a month.

Two months after the procedure, his seizures decreased.

Shih said, “He’s had better than a 95% reduction in his seizures, which is tremendous.”

Doctors hope as time goes by, he may even become seizure-free.

The very first patient to have regenerative cell therapy in New York experienced 30 seizures a month and, a year after treatment, is seizure-free.

Both patients were part of a national clinical trial. Patients who participate must have temporal lobe epilepsy and will be monitored regularly for two years after the procedure.

Health Spotlight is presented by Community Health Network. Contributors to this news report include: Marsha Lewis, producer; Matt Goldschmidt, videographer; Roque Correa, editor.