Can Objective Brain Measures Improve MDD Trial Decisions?
About this webinar
Psychiatric drug development still leans on rating scales developed decades ago: subjective instruments that capture how a patient describes feeling but not what the brain is doing. In major depressive disorder
(MDD), high patient variability, strong placebo responses and limited objective measures of treatment mechanisms can create challenges for trial design and go/no-go decisions. Electroencephalogram (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERP) offer objective, low-burden and inexpensive measures of brain function. This webinar explores where EEG and ERP can support MDD clinical trials, where they fit within a protocol and where their limitations should be considered.
The featured speakers will examine the published literature alongside their own research, including EEG signatures that can distinguish MDD patients from matched controls and track symptom severity. These signatures capture different aspects of the disorder, including cognitive function, emotional processing and behavioral attention. The panelists will discuss how these EEG signatures appear largely non-redundant, suggesting that different paradigms index different facets of the disorder and that a single “depression biomarker” may not capture this complexity. The panelists will also review evidence showing that targeted pharmacological intervention can shift these measures, positioning them as pharmacodynamic rather than exploratory tools.
The panel will focus on decisions development teams face when designing MDD clinical trials. Topics include whether EEG can improve pre-screening, inform dose selection and confirm target engagement earlier and more cost-effectively. The discussion will also address how anxiety, insomnia, disrupted sleep architecture and substance use disorders carry their own electrophysiological signatures and can confound a depression readout if left unmeasured.
The featured panelists will also discuss challenges related to reproducibility, standardization, effect sizes and the distance between group-level signal and individual patient prediction.
Register for this webinar to learn how EEG and ERP readouts can support patient stratification, dose selection and earlier treatment decisions in MDD clinical trials.
Who should attend
- Medical Directors, Clinical Program Leads and Development Heads running Phase I-III psychiatry programs and evaluating EEG endpoints
- Translational Medicine and Biomarker Scientists responsible for selecting, qualifying and defending pharmacodynamic and target-engagement measures in CNS programs
- Clinical Pharmacologists and Experimental Medicine teams working on dose selection, proof-of-mechanism and go/no-go criteria
- Clinical Operations and Trial Design Specialists evaluating feasibility, endpoint strategy and vendor selection for multi-site studies
- Biotech and Pharma Executives in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychedelic medicine, rapid-acting antidepressant development and addiction-adjacent programs
What you will learn
- Which EEG and ERP measures have evidence behind them in MDD, including resting-state alpha power, N170 emotional bias, cognitive ERP components and P200 attention markers
- Where EEG can add decision-making value in a trial protocol by informing dose selection, confirming central target engagement and providing early pharmacodynamic readouts before clinical efficacy emerges
- How sleep EEG and comorbidity signatures, including insomnia, anxiety and substance use, can sharpen patient stratification and prevent confounded depression readouts
- The limitations associated with reproducibility, standardization, realistic effect sizes and translating group-level signals into individual patient predictions
Featured Speakers
Derek Buhl
Dr. Buhl is a Scientific Director in Neuroscience Precision Medicine at AbbVie. He is a Neurophysiologist and Systems Neuroscientist whose work has spanned from running early target discovery projects to implementing end-to-end biomarker strategies for clinical studies in CNS disorders, primarily in schizophrenia, mood disorders and sleep disorders. With nearly 15 years of industry experience starting at Pfizer, Dr. Buhl has led multiple early discovery programs for novel targets in psychiatry before progressing his focus to early clinical development at Takeda and now AbbVie. His work now focuses on the development of translational, circuit-based biomarkers and validation of novel digital tools for remote clinical monitoring to optimize patient stratification, dose rationale and efficacy measures of pharmacological intervention.
Prior to industry, Dr. Buhl completed his PhD in Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University in the lab of Dr. Gyorgy Buzsaki, followed by postdoctoral studies as an HHMI fellow in the lab of Dr. Susumu Tonegawa at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where his research focused on the role of different hippocampal circuits in the coding and recall of memories during behavior and sleep.
Chris Berka
Chris Berka, CSO and Co-founder of Advanced Brain Monitoring has over 35 years of experience managing clinical research and developing and commercializing new technologies. She is a co-inventor of 20 patented technologies and PI or Co-Investigator for grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health, DARPA and NSF that provided more than $40 million of research funds to ABM. Berka leads the research team in projects designed to advance the design, implementation and validation of EEG-based approaches for assessment of neural activity during sleep and waking. Novel empirically and theoretically derived algorithms are featured in her publications on assessing cognition in healthy participants in laboratory and real-world environments and in patients with sleep, psychiatric and neurological diseases. She is an experienced Neuroscientist with over 100 publications on the analysis of the EEG correlates of cognition in healthy subjects and patients with sleep and neurological disorders. She received her BA with distinction in Psychology/Biology at Ohio State University and completed graduate studies in Neuroscience at UCSD.
Natasha Kovacevic
Dr. Natasha Kovacevic is a Senior Director for Precision Psychiatry at Advanced Brain Monitoring and a Computational Neuroscientist specializing in EEG, neuroimaging and data-driven biomarker development. Her current work focuses on developing neurophysiological measures of cognition, emotional processing, psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, with particular emphasis on translating EEG and event-related potentials into practical tools for clinical research and drug development. Previously, she served as Program Manager for the Centre for Integrative Brain Dynamics at the Rotman Research Institute, where she developed multimodal analysis pipelines and investigated brain-signal variability and complexity. She has authored or co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications, including recent studies of EEG signatures associated with depression and PTSD.
Partner for this event
Advanced Brain Monitoring (ABM)
Advanced Brain Monitoring (ABM) develops mobile, scalable EEG and ERP technology that turns brain data into meaningful clinical insight. For over 25 years, ABM has built FDA-cleared and CE-marked platforms, including the Stat X24™ wireless EEG/ERP system and the self-applied Sleep Profiler™, that make research-grade neurophysiological data acquisition possible outside the lab, from clinical settings to global multi-site trials. The company’s work spans two connected businesses: EEG sleep monitoring platforms, and end-to-end EEG/ERP biomarker services for clinical research.
On the research side, ABM partners with pharmaceutical sponsors, CROs, and academic institutions, including Harvard, UCLA, Cornell, and Mayo Clinic, to support biomarker development, trial deployment, and data interpretation across neurodegenerative disease, psychiatric disorders, and novel therapeutics. Backed by over $40M in NIH and DARPA funded R&D, 20+ patents, 50+ clinical trials, and 100+ peer-reviewed publications, ABM has become a trusted EEG/ERP partner to sponsors including AbbVie, Takeda, Biogen, and Roche.