CORTLAND, Ohio - Giovanni Vitello was born healthy in July 2023. For the first six months of his life, he was hitting milestones and developing normally. But just after his half-birthday, his parents noticed unusual eye movements. Days later, an EEG confirmed a devastating diagnosis: infantile spasms, a form of catastrophic seizures that can cause children to stop developing and even regress.

“It was hard, hard to picture him going through that,” his mother, Amanda Vitello, said. “Two days later, he had an EEG that did confirm he had infantile spasms, which are essentially catastrophic seizures for these little kids.”

Further genetic testing revealed Giovanni had tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), a rare disorder that causes noncancerous tumors to grow in the brain and other organs. For

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