Boston, MA – March 14, 2024 - Beacon Biosignals, a leading computational neurodiagnostics and EEG analytics company, has appointed Sudhir Sivakumaran, PhD, as Vice President of Translational Medicine to oversee regulatory and biomarker strategy activities.
Beacon Biosignals partners with top biopharma companies to better understand brain health using clinical-grade sleep EEG and AI-powered analysis. The company’s Dreem 3S wearable medical device enables validated sleep endpoints at-home and unlocks a scale of brain activity data never before available.
Dr. Sivakumaran will draw on his experience in neuroscience, biopharma, and academia, along with deep expertise in neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s Disease, to help drive the biomarker and regulatory approaches for Beacon.
“For far too long, the intricate connection between brain activity, EEG and sleep patterns - despite being studied for decades through various invasive and non-invasive approaches - has remained a mystery in terms of robustly characterizing disease onset, diagnosis, and progression,” said Dr. Sivakumaran. "Beacon's innovative technology, with its FDA-cleared hardware and powerful AI analysis, holds immense potential to unlock these secrets. I am excited to join Beacon’s exceptional team and translate these discoveries with biomarker potential leveraging EEG into actionable tools for drug development and regulatory science, ultimately leading to meaningful real-world solutions.”
"We are excited to welcome Sudhir to our leadership team," said Jacob Donoghue, MD PhD, CEO of Beacon Biosignals. “Beacon is continuing to elevate quantitative sleep and electrophysiological biomarkers to accelerate and improve clinical development. Therapeutic innovation in CNS with precision medicine approaches is creating a new opportunity for biopharma companies to differentiate scientifically and commercially. Every study for a drug that could affect the brain can and should have clinical-grade brain monitoring. Sudhir’s experience driving thought leadership and collaboration between regulatory bodies and pharma companies will help Beacon accelerate our biomarker strategy with strong partnerships and deeper regulatory expertise.”
Dr. Sivakumaran is a neuroscientist with a career spanning academia, industry, and non-profit research. Recently, he led the Alzheimer’s disease consortium (CPAD) and Neuroscience Program at the Critical Path Institute, where he led global initiatives on accelerating and advancing clinical research and drug development for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias. Notably, he led a high impact public-private working group of industry, academic, and regulatory agency colleagues to identify and establish a harmonized and standardized scale for the quantification of tau PET in AD, which formed the basis for evaluating the evidentiary considerations for tau PET to be a reasonably likely surrogate endpoint in AD. Prior to that, he was leading strategic partnerships and alliances overseeing preclinical research and drug development efforts at Pfizer and Aptinyx. Sudhir holds a PhD in Neuroscience from SISSA/ISAS in Italy, with his research work encompassing computational neuroscience, systems biology, and translational neurophysiology.