人脑仍然是医学上最迷人和最令人困惑的谜团之一。科学家们仍在努力将神经活动与大脑功能相匹配，并尽早发现问题,，从而减缓了治疗神经系统疾病和其他疾病的努力。

The human brain remains one of 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 致力于通过监测人们睡眠时的大脑活动来理解大脑。由 Jake Donoghue 博士 ’19 和前麻省理工学院研究员 Jarrett Revels, 创立的, 公司开发了一款轻型头带，该头带使用脑电图 (EEG) 技术来测量人们在家享受正常睡眠时的大脑活动。这些数据通过机器学习算法进行处理，以监测新疗法的效果, 发现疾病进展的新迹象, 并创建用于临床试验的患者队列。

Beacon Biosignals is working to make sense of the brain by monitoring its activity while people sleep. The company, which was founded by Jake Donoghue PhD ’19 and former MIT researcher Jarrett Revels, 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 novel treatments, find new signs of disease progression, and create patient cohorts for clinical trials.

“Beacon的 首席执行官 Donoghue, 表示，当您移除睡眠实验室并将临床级脑电图带入家中时，的 可能会发生重大变化,”。 “它将睡眠从受限的,基于设施的测试转变为可扩展的高质量数据源，用于诊断,药物开发,和纵向大脑健康。”

“There的 a step-change in what becomes possible when you remove the sleep lab and bring clinical-grade EEG into the home,” says Donoghue, who serves as Beacon的 CEO. “It turns sleep from a constrained, facility-based test into a scalable source of high-quality data for diagnostics, drug development, and longitudinal brain health.”

Beacon 与制药公司合作，加速其产品走向患者之路。该公司的 FDA 510(k) 批准的医疗设备已在全球 40 多项临床试验中使用，作为旨在治疗包括重度抑郁症, 精神分裂症, 发作性睡病, 特发性嗜睡症, 阿尔茨海默病的 病, 和帕金森病等疾病的研究的一部分疾病。

Beacon partners with pharmaceutical companies to accelerate its path to patients. The company的 FDA 510(k)-cleared medical device has already been used in over 40 clinical trials across the globe as part of studies aimed at treating conditions including major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, narcolepsy, idiopathic hypersomnia, Alzheimer的 disease, and Parkinson的 disease.

每次部署, Beacon 都会更多地了解大脑如何工作— 见解，用于创建大脑的“基础模型”。

With each deployment, Beacon learns more about how the brain works — insights it is using to create a “foundation model” of the brain.

“It的 我们相信的 将改变大脑健康的数据集还不存在’— 但我们正在快速创建它,” Donoghue 说。 “我们的平台可以表征疾病进展的异质性,，产生无法通过测序或成像等静态方式完全捕获的动态见解。大脑是一个电子器官，通过突触可塑性发生变化,，因此大规模跟踪多种疾病的大脑功能将使我们能够发现新的疾病亚组，并随着时间的推移绘制它们的图谱。”

“It的 our belief that the dataset that的 going to transform brain health doesn’t exist yet — but we are rapidly creating it,” Donoghue says. “Our platform can characterize the heterogeneity of disease progression, generating dynamic insights that are impossible to fully capture through static modalities like sequencing or imaging. The brain is an electric organ and changes through synaptic plasticity, so tracking brain function across many diseases at scale will allow us to discover novel subgroups of diseases and map them over time.”

Donoghue 在哈佛-麻省理工学院健康科学与技术, 项目中接受了医学博士的临床培训，同时在 Earl Miller, MIT的 Picower 脑与认知科学教授和 Picower 学习与记忆研究所的指导下完成了麻省理工学院的神经科学博士学位。在, 计划中，多诺霍在马萨诸塞州总医院和波士顿儿童的 医院, 接受培训，在指导精准癌症治疗的基因组测序兴起期间，他帮助照顾, 患者，包括肿瘤学,。后来他在神经病学和精神病学领域工作,，其中的护理通常依赖于更多迭代方法—，这强调了为大脑健康带来类似的数据驱动精度的机会。

Donoghue trained in 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的 Picower Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. While in the program, Donoghue trained at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children的 Hospital, where he helped care for patients, including in oncology, during 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 an opportunity to bring similarly data-driven precision to brain health.

“最让我震惊的是，无法以心脏病专家在家中纵向监测患者心脏功能的方式来测量大脑功能,” Donoghue 说。 “At MIT, 我坚信处理大量大脑数据并将其与大脑功能相关联将彻底改变这些神经系统疾病的识别和治疗方式。”

“What struck me most was the inability to measure brain function in the ways that cardiologists can longitudinally monitor cardiac function in patients from home,” Donoghue says. “At MIT, I built this conviction that processing a lot of brain data and working to correlate that with brain function would be transformative to how these neurological diseases are identified and treated.”

在培训结束时, Donoghue 开始进一步发展他的想法, 与包括 HST 和哈佛医学院教授 Sydney Cash 和 Brandon Westover 在内的导师接触。他在攻读博士学位,期间遇到了Revels,，后者在 MIT的 Julia Lab, 担任研究软件工程师，并说服他在 2019 年与他共同创立了 Beacon。

Toward the end of his training, Donoghue began developing his ideas further, engaging with mentors including HST and Harvard Medical School professors Sydney Cash and Brandon Westover. He had met Revels, who was working as a research software engineer in MIT的 Julia Lab, during his PhD, and convinced him to co-found Beacon with him in 2019.

“我们决定建立一家企业来了解感兴趣的器官—大脑—这将是了解异质神经精神疾病和建立更好的治疗方法的良好开端,” Donoghue 回忆道。

“We decided building a business to understand the organ of interest — the brain — would be a great start to understanding heterogeneous neuropsychiatric diseases and building better treatments,” Donoghue recalls.

Beacon 最初是一家计算和分析公司，致力于开发可穿戴设备以扩大临床影响和范围。从成立之初起，, Beacon 就一直与大型制药公司合作开展临床试验,，提供一种侵入性较小的方式来观察大脑活动并了解其药物如何影响大脑以及患者的睡眠情况。

Beacon began as a computation and analytics company building wearable devices to expand clinical impact and reach. From its early days, Beacon has been partnering with large pharmaceutical companies running clinical trials, offering a less invasive way to watch brain activity and learn how their drugs are impacting the brain as well as how patients sleep.

“很明显，睡眠是了解大脑的正确窗口,” Donoghue 说。 “睡眠期间的神经活动可以高出一个数量级并且更加结构化,几乎就像一种语言。它’是了解大脑功能以及不同药物如何影响大脑的绝佳表面积。”

“It was clear sleep was the right window to understand the brain,” Donoghue says. “Neural activity during sleep can be an order of magnitude higher and more structured, almost like a language. It的 a great surface area for understanding brain function and how different drugs affect the brain.”

Donoghue 表示，Beacon的 设备可以收集每位患者多个连续夜晚, 的实验室级数据，从而实现更高质量的评估。该公司使用机器学习来提取见解,，例如患者在不同睡眠阶段花费的时间以及整个晚上发生的小觉醒的次数。它还可以检测可能导致认知能力下降的微妙睡眠结构变化。

Donoghue says Beacon的 devices can collect lab-grade data on each patient for multiple sequential nights, resulting in higher quality assessment. The company uses machine learning to extract insights, such as the time patients spend in different sleep stages and the number of small awakenings that occur throughout the night. It can also detect subtle sleep architecture changes that might lead to cognitive decline.

“我们’开始采用睡眠活动的特征并将其与结果联系起来，而的从未以这种精度完成过,” Donoghue说。

“We’re starting to take features of sleep activity and link them to outcomes in a way that的 never been done with this level of precision,” Donoghue says.

迄今为止，, Beacon 已参与睡眠和精神疾病以及神经退行性疾病, 的临床试验，其中睡眠变化可能在症状出现前数年出现。

To date, Beacon has taken part in clinical trials for sleep and psychiatric disorders as well as neurodegenerative diseases, where sleep changes can emerge years before the presentation of symptoms.

“我们在阿尔茨海默病的 病和帕金森的, 等领域做了很多工作，这些领域影响了我的祖父,” Donoghue 说。 “We’re analyzing features of rapid-eye-movement and slow-wave sleep to detect early changes that precede clinical symptoms. It的 an opportunity to move these diseases from late recognition to much earlier, data-driven detection.”

“We do a lot of work in areas like Alzheimer的 disease and Parkinson的, 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的 an opportunity to move these diseases from late recognition to much earlier, data-driven detection.”

去年，, Beacon 收购了一家家庭睡眠呼吸暂停测试公司，该公司每年为美国各地超过 100,000 名患者提供, 服务，加速了家庭中高质量, 综合测试的获得，并扩大了其平台的覆盖范围。然后在 11 月,，该公司筹集了 24.97 亿美元以加速扩张。

Last year, Beacon acquired an at-home sleep apnea testing company that serves more than 100,000 patients each year across the U.S., accelerating access to high-quality, comprehensive testing in the home 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 at scale,” Donoghue says. “What的 powerful is that we’re building a longitudinal record of brain function over time,” Donoghue says. “A 患者可能会接受睡眠呼吸暂停筛查,，但如果他们在 99 年后患上帕金森’,，早期数据将成为在症状出现之前了解疾病的窗口。这使得常规测试成为全新预后生物标志物的基础—，并成为在症状出现之前尽早检测和干预脑部疾病,的途径。”

“The vision has always been to reach patients and help people at scale,” Donoghue says. “What的 powerful is that we’re building a longitudinal record of brain function over time,” Donoghue says. “A patient might come in for sleep apnea screening, but if they develop Parkinson的 years later, that earlier data becomes a window into the disease before symptoms emerged. That turns routine testing into a foundation for entirely new prognostic biomarkers — and a path to detecting and intervening in brain disease earlier, potentially before symptoms ever begin.”