Using EEG to Identify Novel Biomarkers of Neurological and Psychiatric Diseases with Dr. Jacob Donoghue Beacon Biosignals TRANSCRIPT

Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Jacob Donoghue is the CEO and Co-Founder of Beacon Biosignals, a computational neurobiomarker discovery and deployment platform taking EEG readings and applying their algorithms to identify novel neurobiomarkers that might be related to a disease that can be modulated by a new therapy.

Jacob drills down, "We anchor these biomarkers that we are able to identify off the world's largest annotated EEG database, which we have at Beacon, to be able to really put things into context. When we make a discovery, we can really see, even in a small cohort of patients, how does that relate to both other patients with that related disease or also healthy normal patients?

"Beacon was born by looking at the massive opportunity and unmet need in patients with neurological and psychiatric diseases and to take in all these long data sets of electrical brain activity, EEG data, to be able to provide the same types of tools that were transforming digital pathology, radiology, and GI to better characterize diseases of the brain and help novel therapies make it through the clinical development process into patients."

"One of the traditional endpoints that persist in rare diseases for epilepsy is often the seizure diary, where you ask the parents, in the case of pediatric genetic epilepsy, you ask the parents to annotate either in a paper notebook or in an app when they see a visible event that resembles a seizure or is a seizure event."

"In some of the kids that we've started analyzing, we see that the patient reported seizures, the seizure diaries, will show only 10 or 20 seizures a day, but when you put an EEG on, you actually capture hundreds of seizures per day. And similarly, we have other kids where they're actually having 0 seizures a day, but the patient diaries often will report 10 or 20 seizures a day."

@biosignals #BeaconBiosignals #EEG #Epilepsy #RareDiseases #SleepDisorders #Neurology #NeurologicalDiseases #NeuroDegenerativeDiseases #PsychiatricDiseases #ML #MachineLearning

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