The human brain stays probably the most fascinating and perplexing mysteries in medicine. Scientists still struggle to match neurological activity with brain function and detect problems early, slowing efforts to treat neurological disorders and other diseases.
Beacon Biosignals is working to make sense of the brain by monitoring its activity while people sleep. The corporate, which was founded by Jake Donoghue PhD ’19 and former MIT researcher Jarrett Revels, developed a light-weight headband that uses electroencephalogram (EEG) technology to measure brain activity while people enjoy their normal sleep routines at home. Those data are processed by machine-learning algorithms to watch the consequences of novel treatments, find latest signs of disease progression, and create patient cohorts for clinical trials.
“There’s a step-change in what becomes possible whenever you remove the sleep lab and convey clinical-grade EEG into the house,” says Donoghue, who serves as Beacon’s CEO. “It turns sleep from a constrained, facility-based test right into a scalable source of high-quality data for diagnostics, drug development, and longitudinal brain health.”
Beacon partners with pharmaceutical firms to speed up its path to patients. The corporate’s FDA 510(k)-cleared medical device has already been utilized in over 40 clinical trials across the globe as a part of studies geared toward treating conditions including major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, narcolepsy, idiopathic hypersomnia, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.
With each deployment, Beacon learns more about how the brain works — insights it’s using to create a “foundation model” of the brain.
“It’s our belief that the dataset that’s going to rework brain health doesn’t exist yet — but we’re rapidly creating it,” Donoghue says. “Our platform can characterize the heterogeneity of disease progression, generating dynamic insights which might be inconceivable to totally capture through static modalities like sequencing or imaging. The brain is an electrical organ and changes through synaptic plasticity, so tracking brain function across many diseases at scale will allow us to find novel subgroups of diseases and map them over time.”
Illuminating the brain
Donoghue trained within the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, conducting clinical training for an MD while completing his PhD in neuroscience at MIT under the guidance of Earl Miller, MIT’s Picower Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. While in this system, Donoghue trained at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, where he helped look after patients, including in oncology, throughout the rise of genomic sequencing to guide precision cancer therapies. He later worked in neurology and psychiatry, where care often relied on more iterative approaches — highlighting a chance to bring similarly data-driven precision to brain health.
“What struck me most was the shortcoming to measure brain function within the ways in which cardiologists can longitudinally monitor cardiac function in patients from home,” Donoghue says. “At MIT, I built this conviction that processing quite a lot of brain data and dealing to correlate that with brain function can be transformative to how these neurological diseases are identified and treated.”
Toward the top of his training, Donoghue began developing his ideas further, engaging with mentors including HST and Harvard Medical School professors Sydney Money and Brandon Westover. He had met Revels, who was working as a research software engineer in MIT’s Julia Lab, during his PhD, and convinced him to co-found Beacon with him in 2019.
“We decided constructing a business to know the organ of interest — the brain — can be an awesome begin to understanding heterogeneous neuropsychiatric diseases and constructing higher treatments,” Donoghue recalls.
Beacon began as a computation and analytics company constructing wearable devices to expand clinical impact and reach. From its early days, Beacon has been partnering with large pharmaceutical firms running clinical trials, offering a less invasive option to watch brain activity and learn the way their drugs are impacting the brain in addition to how patients sleep.
“It was clear sleep was the precise window to know the brain,” Donoghue says. “Neural activity during sleep will be an order of magnitude higher and more structured, almost like a language. It’s an awesome surface area for understanding brain function and the way different drugs affect the brain.”
Donoghue says Beacon’s devices can collect lab-grade data on each patient for multiple sequential nights, leading to higher quality assessment. The corporate uses machine learning to extract insights, reminiscent of the time patients spend in several sleep stages and the variety of small awakenings that occur throughout the night. It may possibly also detect subtle sleep architecture changes which may result in cognitive decline.
“We’re beginning to take features of sleep activity and link them to outcomes in a way that’s never been done with this level of precision,” Donoghue says.
Thus far, Beacon has taken part in clinical trials for sleep and psychiatric disorders in addition to neurodegenerative diseases, where sleep changes can emerge years before the presentation of symptoms.
“We do quite a lot of work in areas like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s, which affected my grandfather,” Donoghue says. “We’re analyzing features of rapid-eye-movement and slow-wave sleep to detect early changes that precede clinical symptoms. It’s a chance to maneuver these diseases from late recognition to much earlier, data-driven detection.”
Improving brain treatments for tens of millions
Last 12 months, Beacon acquired an at-home sleep apnea testing company that serves greater than 100,000 patients every year across the U.S., accelerating access to high-quality, comprehensive testing in the house and expanding the reach of its platform. Then in November, the corporate raised $97 million to speed up that expansion.
“The vision has at all times been to achieve patients and help people at scale,” Donoghue says. “What’s powerful is that we’re constructing a longitudinal record of brain function over time,” Donoghue says. “A patient might are available in for sleep apnea screening, but in the event that they develop Parkinson’s years later, that earlier data becomes a window into the disease before symptoms emerged. That turns routine testing right into a foundation for entirely latest prognostic biomarkers — and a path to detecting and intervening in brain disease earlier, potentially before symptoms ever begin.”