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Unlike cancer, brain diseases like epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, or depression don't tend to have  easily measured biomarkers that could help doctors tailor treatments, or that could help researchers develop more effective drugs. So in neurology and psychiatry, the precision medicine revolution hasn't really arrived yet. But Beacon Biosignals, where Harry's guest  Jacob Donoghue is the co-founder and CEO, is trying to change all that. Beacon is focused on making electroencephalography into a more reliable and useful data source for diagnosing and treating neurological disease. 

EEG is a non-invasive way to measure electrical activity in the brain, and it’s been a common medical tool for almost 100 years. But takes a lot of training for a human doctor to interpret an EEG correctly. It’s slow, it’s expensive, and it’s a bit of a dark art—all of which makes it the perfect candidate for machine learning analysis. Donoghue says the goal at Beacon Biosignals is to use computation to get more value out of existing EEG data. By peering deeper into the data, he thinks it should be possible to identify subtypes of problems like epilepsy or Alzheimer’s, and help neurologists understand which patients will respond best to which therapies. On top of that, better EEG measurements could also give drug developers and regulators more clinical endpoints to measure when they’re trying to evaluate the safety and efficacy of new drugs for CNS diseases. If Beacon’s vision comes true, the precision medicine revolution might finally start to reach the brain.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

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