Stratus Announces Partnership with Beacon Biosignals to Advance At-Home Brain Monitoring and Machine Learning-enabled Neurodiagnostics
Collaboration will Enable AI-powered Decentralized Clinical Trials
BOSTON, May 10, 2022—Beacon Biosignals, which applies AI to EEG to unlock precision medicine for brain conditions, today announced a partnership with Stratus, the nation’s leading provider of EEG services, to enable expanded clinical trial service capabilities by leveraging Beacon’s machine learning neuroanalytics platform.
EEG is standard of care in the clinical diagnosis and management of many neurologic diseases and sleep disorders, yet features of clinical significance often are difficult to extract from EEG data. Broader adoption of EEG technology has been further limited by labor-intensive workflows and variability in clinician expert interpretation. By linking their platforms, Beacon and Stratus will unlock AI-powered at-home clinical trials, addressing these challenges head-on.
“The benefits of widely incorporating EEG data into pharmaceutical trials has been desired for years, but the challenge of uniformly capturing and interpreting the data has been an issue,” said Charlie Alvarez, chief executive officer for Stratus. “Stratus helps solve data capture issues by providing accessible, nationwide testing services that reduce the variability in data collection and help ensure high-quality data across all sites. Stratus is proud to partner with Beacon and its ability to complete the equation by providing algorithms to ensure the quality of EEG interpretations.”
Stratus offers a wide variety of EEG services, including monitored long-term video studies and routine EEGs conducted in the hospital, clinic, and in patients’ homes. Stratus has a strong track record of high-quality data acquisition, enabled by an industry-leading pool of registered EEG technologists and a national footprint for EEG deployment logistics. The announced agreement establishes Stratus as a preferred data acquisition partner for Beacon’s clinical trial and neurobiomarker discovery efforts using Beacon’s analytics platform.
“Reliable and replicable quantitative endpoints help drive faster, better-powered trials,” said Jacob Donoghue, MD, PhD, co-founder of Beacon Biosignals. “A barrier to their development, along with performing the necessary analysis, can often be the acquisition of quality EEG at scale. Partnering with Stratus and benefiting from its infrastructure and platform eliminates that hurdle and paves the way toward addressing the unmet need for endpoints, safety tools and computational diagnostics.”
Beacon’s platform provides an architectural foundation for discovery of robust quantitative neurobiomarkers that subsequently can be deployed for patient stratification or automated safety or efficacy monitoring in clinical trials. The powerful and validated algorithms developed by Beacon’s machine learning teams can replicate the consensus interpretation of multiple trained epileptologists while exceeding human capabilities over many hours or days of recording. These algorithms can be focused on therapeutic areas such as neurodegenerative disorders, epilepsy, sleep disorders and mental illness. For example, Beacon is currently assessing novel EEG signatures in Alzheimer’s disease patients to identify which patients may or may not benefit from a specific type of therapy.
“This collaboration will enable at-home studies for diseases like Alzheimer’s,” Donoghue said. “It has traditionally been difficult to obtain clinical-grade EEG for these patients at the scale required for phase 3 and phase 4 clinical trials. Stratus’ extensive expertise in scaling EEG operations in at-home settings unlocks real opportunities to harness brain data to evaluate treatment efficacy.”
Originally published on PR Newswire
About Beacon Biosignals
Beacon’s machine learning platform for EEG enables and accelerates new treatments that transform the lives of patients with neurological, psychiatric or sleep disorders. Through novel machine learning algorithms, large clinical datasets, and advances in software engineering, Beacon Biosignals empowers biopharma companies with unparalleled tools for efficacy monitoring, patient stratification, and clinical trial endpoints from brain data. For more information, visit https://beacon.bio/.
About Stratus
Stratus is the nation’s leading provider of EEG solutions, including ambulatory in-home video EEG. The company has served more than 80,000 patients across the U.S. Stratus offers technology, services, and proprietary software solutions to help neurologists accurately and quickly diagnose their patients with epilepsy and other seizure-like disorders. Stratus also provides mobile cardiac telemetry to support the diagnostic testing needs of the neurology community. To learn more, visit www.stratusneuro.com.