Beacon Biosignals raises $27M to scale EEG, AI-based neurobiomarker discovery platform

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Neu­rotech start­up Bea­con Biosig­nals scores $27M to bring AI to EEG analy­sis (Med­C­i­ty News):

Elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy is a decades-old tech­nique for cap­tur­ing brain activ­i­ty, data that are used to eval­u­ate brain dis­or­ders. Bea­con Biosig­nals is apply­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to these tests, and the neu­rotech­nol­o­gy start­up has found a ready mar­ket in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies inter­est­ed in assess­ing how their exper­i­men­tal brain ther­a­pies are work­ing. Now Bea­con Biosig­nals has some­thing else: $27 mil­lion in financing.

Dur­ing an elec­troen­cephalo­gram (EEG) pro­ce­dure, elec­trodes are affixed to the patient’s scalp. Over a peri­od of time, typ­i­cal­ly up to an hour, those elec­trodes cap­ture elec­tri­cal sig­nals from the brain. By ana­lyz­ing those sig­nals, clin­i­cians can learn what’s hap­pen­ing with the brain. This insight can help diag­nose brain and sleep dis­or­ders. How­ev­er, ana­lyz­ing EEGs is labor inten­sive and inter­pre­ta­tion of these tests can vary from one clin­i­cian to anoth­er. Bea­con Biosig­nals says its tech­nol­o­gy can over­come the lim­i­ta­tions of human analy­sis of EEGs.…Beacon Biosig­nals has assem­bled what it claims is one of the world’s largest clin­i­cal EEG data­bas­es. By apply­ing its pro­pri­etary machine-learn­ing algo­rithms to the data­base, the com­pa­ny says it has iden­ti­fied neurobiomarkers—biological indi­ca­tors that are asso­ci­at­ed with cer­tain groups of patients, drug activ­i­ty, and ther­a­peu­tic efficacy.

The Announcement:

Bea­con Biosig­nals rais­es $27 Mil­lion Series A led by Gen­er­al Cat­a­lyst to scale its EEG neu­ro­bio­mark­er dis­cov­ery plat­form (press release):

Found­ed in 2019 by MD/PhDs and engi­neers from Har­vard and MIT, Bea­con’s launch was pro­pelled by the vision of a com­put­ing plat­form designed to scale the inter­ro­ga­tion of large brain­wave datasets with unprece­dent­ed through­put and capa­bil­i­ty … EEG is stan­dard of care in the clin­i­cal diag­no­sis and man­age­ment of many neu­ro­log­ic dis­eases and sleep dis­or­ders, but fea­tures of clin­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance are often buried in hours of EEG data. Broad­er uptake of EEG tech­nol­o­gy has been fur­ther lim­it­ed by labor-inten­sive work­flows and vari­abil­i­ty in clin­i­cian expert interpretation.

“Our cur­rent progress has demon­strat­ed that EEG is incred­i­bly infor­ma­tion-rich phys­i­o­log­ic out­put reflect­ing genet­ic sub­strate, accu­mu­lat­ed expo­sures and acute neu­ro­phys­i­o­log­ic changes, beyond what is cap­tured in MRI, fMRI, CSF analy­ses or genet­ic analy­ses. We have already iden­ti­fied nov­el elec­tro­phys­i­o­log­ic sig­na­tures func­tion­al­ly linked to pri­ma­ry cog­ni­tive end­points in Alzheimer’s dis­ease. We’re fur­ther encour­aged by the appli­ca­tions of our plat­form toward het­eroge­nous psy­chi­atric dis­eases such as schiz­o­phre­nia and major depres­sive dis­or­der,” said Jacob Donoghue MD, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO of Bea­con. “Bea­con is ded­i­cat­ed to help­ing our bio­phar­ma part­ners accel­er­ate nov­el ther­a­peu­tics to reach patients with sig­nif­i­cant unmet need. We are excit­ed to part­ner with Gen­er­al Cat­a­lyst and Cas­din Cap­i­tal to scale our plat­form to dri­ve new insights for patient strat­i­fi­ca­tion, PK/PD, and effi­ca­cy endpoints.”

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