Sleep as a Window into Early Stages of Alzheimer’s Pathophysiology: Implications for Clinical Development

Sleep is fundamental to memory consolidation and neural repair, making it one of the most biologically meaningful signals we can measure in aging and neurodegeneration. Sleep disturbances are often among the earliest detectable changes in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), emerging years before memory loss, cognitive decline, and diagnosis, and potentially ahead of pathology accumulation itself. This webinar explores how sleep EEG can support earlier detection of Alzheimer’s pathophysiology and inform AD/Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) trial design.

The featured speakers will examine how disrupted sleep is tied to pathways implicated in neurodegeneration, including synaptic homeostasis, neuroinflammation, metabolic waste clearance, and glial cell function, with slow-wave sleep thought to be central to the glymphatic clearance of amyloid-beta and tau. Poor sleep may accelerate pathological protein accumulation, which in turn degrades the brain regions that regulate sleep, making disrupted sleep both an early symptom and likely contributor to AD: disrupting slow-wave activity for a single night raises CSF amyloid-beta by morning, and reduced slow-wave activity separately tracks with greater amyloid burden on PET.

The discussion will also address how sleep can serve both an early functional readout, ahead of standard cognitive testing, and a sensitive measure of clinical benefit. Spindle-slow wave coupling tracks early amyloid burden and predicts memory decline in cognitively healthy older adults, and because sleep metrics shift within days to months rather than the years needed for structural or cognitive endpoints, they can track amyloid accumulation and predict memory decline over 6- to 24-month windows, a timescale well suited to interim analyses and go/no-go decisions. Speakers will address how biomarker-positive but cognitively normal patients can be identified through sleep EEG and enrolled earlier than current diagnostic pathways allow.

Attendees will learn how sleep EEG endpoints can be incorporated into trial design to help capture treatment signals earlier, support interim analyses, and characterize response.

Register for this webinar to learn how sleep EEG can support earlier detection of Alzheimer’s pathophysiology and strengthen AD/MCI clinical trial design.

Speakers

Jake Donoghue, MD, PhD, CEO, Beacon Biosignals

Jacob Donoghue, MD, PhD, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Beacon Biosignals, founded in 2019 with the mission of decoding sleep to advance brain health. He leads the company’s efforts to transform how neurological, psychiatric and sleep disorders are diagnosed and treated using AI-powered sleep EEG analytics.

Under his leadership, Beacon has built a platform that combines FDA-cleared wearable EEG devices with advanced analytics to identify digital neurobiomarkers, supporting precision medicine in clinical trials and diagnostics.

Dr. Donoghue received his MD from Harvard Medical School and PhD in Neuroscience from MIT, where his research focused on how neuroactive compounds modulate brain network activity. His scientific work spans neurophysiology, neuropharmacology and machine learning for neural signal analysis.

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Jay Pathmanathan, MD, PhD, Senior Medical Director, Beacon Biosignals

Jay Pathmanathan, MD, PhD, is a Harvard trained epileptologist and clinical neurophysiologist who spent over a decade in academic clinical practice, including a faculty appointment at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, before joining Beacon Biosignals as Medical Director.

At Beacon, he leads clinical and scientific strategy for the company’s EEG-based biomarker platform, with research interests in sleep-based biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease and the value of longitudinal sleep monitoring. Dr. Pathmanathan has led multiple clinical trials examining sleep disturbances in neurological disease, co-authored numerous peer-reviewed publications on EEG biomarker discovery in neurodegenerative disease alongside researchers from around the world, and presents Beacon’s research at multiple conferences annually.

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