The human brain remains one of the most fascinating and perplexing mysteries in medicine. Scientists are still struggling to match neurological activity to brain function and detect problems early, slowing efforts to treat neurological disorders and other diseases.
Beacon Biosignals is working to understand people’s brain activity by monitoring it while they sleep. The company, which was founded by Jake Donoghue PhD ’19 and former MIT researcher Jarrett Revels, has developed a lightweight 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 monitor the effects of new treatments, find new signs of disease progression, and create patient groups for clinical trials.
“There’s a step-change that’s possible when you remove the sleep lab and bring clinical-grade EEG into the home,” says Donoghue, who serves as Beacon’s CEO. “This transforms sleep from a limited, feature-based test into a scalable source of high-quality data for diagnosis, drug development, and longitudinal brain health.”
To speed its way to patients, Beacon has partnered with pharmaceutical companies. The company’s FDA 510(k)-cleared medical device has already been used in more than 40 clinical trials worldwide as part of studies aimed at 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 is using to build a “foundation model” of the brain.
“It is our belief that the dataset that will transform brain health does not yet exist – but we are building it rapidly,” says Donoghue. “Our platform can characterize the heterogeneity of disease progression, generating dynamic insights that are impossible to fully capture through static methods such as sequencing or imaging. The brain is an electrical organ and changes through synaptic plasticity, so tracking brain function across multiple diseases at a large scale will allow us to discover new subgroups of diseases and map them over time.”
light up the brain
Donoghue trained at the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, conducted clinical training for her MD, and completed her PhD in neuroscience at MIT under the guidance of Earl Miller, MIT’s Pickower Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Pickower Institute for Learning and Memory. While in the program, Donoghue trained at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, where she helped care for patients, including oncology, during the rise of genomic sequencing to guide precise cancer treatments. He later worked in neurology and psychiatry, where care often relied on a more iterative approach – highlighting the opportunity to bring similar data-driven precision to brain health.
“What struck me most was the inability to measure brain function the way cardiologists can longitudinally monitor cardiac function in patients from home,” says Donoghue. “At MIT, I formed the conviction that processing lots of brain data and correlating it with brain function would be transformative in how these neurological diseases are identified and treated.”
At the end of his training, Donoghue began to further develop his ideas, connecting with mentors including HST and Harvard Medical School professors Sidney Cash and Brandon Westover. During his PhD he met Revels, who was working as a research software engineer in MIT’s Julia Lab, and he convinced her to co-found Beacon with him in 2019.
Donoghue recalls, “We decided to build a business to understand the organ of interest – the brain – which would be a great start to understanding various neuropsychiatric diseases and creating better treatments.”
Beacon started as a computing and analytics company building wearable devices to expand clinical impact and reach. Since its early days, Beacon has been partnering with large pharmaceutical companies running clinical trials, offering a less invasive way to observe brain activity and learn how their drugs are affecting the brain as well as patients’ sleep.
“It was clear that sleep was the perfect window to understand the brain,” says Donoghue. “Neural activity during sleep can be orders of magnitude higher and more structured, almost like a language. This is a great surface area for understanding brain function and how different drugs affect the brain.”
Donoghue says Beacon’s equipment can collect lab-grade data on each patient for multiple sequential nights, resulting in higher quality assessments. The company uses machine learning to extract insights, such as how much time patients spend in different stages of sleep and the number of short awakenings that occur throughout the night. It can also detect subtle changes in sleep structure that may lead to cognitive decline.
“We are starting to take characteristics of sleep activity and link them to outcomes in a way that has never been done with this level of accuracy,” says Donoghue.
To date, Beacon has participated in clinical trials for sleep and mental disorders as well as neurodegenerative diseases, where changes in sleep may emerge years before the presentation of symptoms.
“We do a lot of work in areas like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s, which influenced my grandfather,” Donoghue says. “We are analyzing characteristics of rapid-eye-movement and slow-wave sleep to detect early changes that occur before clinical symptoms. This is an opportunity to move these diseases from late detection to much earlier, data-driven identification.”
Improving brain treatment for millions of people
Last year, Beacon acquired an at-home sleep apnea testing company that serves more than 100,000 patients annually across the US, accelerating access to high-quality, comprehensive at-home testing and expanding the reach of its platform. Then in November, the company raised $97 million to accelerate that expansion.
“The vision has always been to reach patients and help people on a larger scale,” Donoghue says. “The most powerful thing is that we are creating a longitudinal record of brain functioning over time,” says Donoghue. “A patient may come in for sleep apnea screening, but if they develop Parkinson’s years later, the earlier data becomes a window into the disease before symptoms emerge. This turns routine testing into a basis for entirely new prognostic biomarkers – and a way to detect and intervene with brain disease earlier, potentially before symptoms begin.”
