 I'd like to thank the Brand Foundation and its supporters for this award which will definitely go a long way into understanding the causes of epilepsy in some of our little patients. I'm a pediatric neurologist from the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne and the research our team does is driven by the patients we see in the clinic. Epilepsy is probably the most common neurological disorder we see in our patients and it's got many causes. In approximately 70% of our patients we can treat the epilepsy fairly effectively with anti-convulsant or anti-seizure medications but that leaves approximately 30% of children who have what we call drug resistant epilepsy. Epilepsy is primarily a pediatric disease. Most people who develop epilepsy develop it in childhood and it can come on at any age. In fact this morning before I flew up here I was in our neonatal unit seeing a three-week-old baby who's been having seizures probably since before he was born in fact. Of the patients who have drug resistant seizures a major cause are patients where a part of the brain has not developed normally in the pregnancy as was this little baby in the clinic and the research project that this Brain Foundation Award will support is to try and understand the causes of these lesions or malformations better. We have a very active epilepsy surgery program in Melbourne led by Simon Harvey in Virginia Maksner and these patients with these lesions often the only treatment that gives them hope of curing their epilepsy or reducing their seizures is to actually remove these developmental lesions from the brain and we approach all patients and parents of these children before they go to epilepsy surgery asking if we can actually save some of that tissue that's resected. Thus far nobody has said no we've been doing this for a couple of years saving tissue we haven't yet had the funds to do all the things we'd like to do with it. So in the theatre as the brain tissue is removed it goes straight into dry ice and then off to our lab and the aim of the research project is to really understand the causes of these lesions and it's emerging that these lesions have a genetic basis as a genetic error that's taken place during brain development in a population of the cells that form these lesions that cause the seizures and we're trying to understand by directly studying the brain tissue the nature of these mutations or gene changes whether those changes are just in the tissue or in the rest of the body or are a combination of a number of mutations. The funding from this award will help us do the genetic testing we'd like to do which is called whole exome sequencing some of you might have heard of the great advances in genetic testing that we can now rapidly and cost effectively screen all of our 22,000 genes something that about 15 years ago cost a hundred million dollars to do now costs a thousand dollars to do per patient. What will this mean for the patients and the children we look after? All the parents that we have who have children with with these severe forms of epilepsy want to know why it's happened? Is there a cause that that can be identified? Is this a genetic cause? Is this something that can recur in future pregnancies? Which is very important we hope we can answer that with this testing. We also hope that by understanding the genetic cause and exactly which part of the lesions hold the mutations that might hold promise for better forms of surgery to treat these severe forms of epilepsy more restricted forms of surgery but also if we understand the pathways of the genes that are affected there may open avenues to better medical treatments by targeting the therapy directly to the pathway affected. So once again on behalf of our team in Melbourne, Associate Professor Paul Lockhart, Simon Harvey and Virginia Maksner we're very honoured to receive this award and I would very much like to thank the Brain Foundation for their generous support. Thank you.