Pharmaceutical Research and Development Consulting: Obtaining As Much Information As Possible to Guide Drug Research

We strive to provide the pharmaceutical developer with as much information as possible about how their drugs affect the human brain.  To do so, we must do well at measuring brain function. Our technological objective is to develop and fine-tune technology for measuring system-level brain function associated with both sensory and cognitive processing.  By addressing this technological objective we can meet our larger objective of working with drug developers to create better pharmaceuticals.

To ensure the developer receives the maximum available information about how the drug impacts brain activity, we provide two levels of analysis.  Our Stage I analysis utilizes our existing and proven algorithms to provide the developer with results objectively determined without visual inspection or modifications to our data analysis algorithms. This analysis can be provided soon after the data collection is complete.  In contrast, our Stage II analysis utilizes our current ‘beta’ algorithms designed after inspecting our client’s data.  This provides us an opportunity to improve our existing algorithms and provide the client with more information about brain function and the drug effect they are investigating.

The Steps In Our Partnership and Consulting Process

The general process we follow has 6 main steps.

The first 2 steps involve:

(1) working with the developer to design the EEG data collection paradigm, and

(2) providing guidance in the data collection process to ensure the best possible brain results.

Once data have been collected, our team:

(3) analyzes the acquired EEG data using our existing algorithms to construct a data-driven model (a set of 3D brain maps) of the brain activity that occurred during data collection (Stage I analysis),

(4) presents Stage I analysis results to the developer in terms of each experimental condition separately, and as a difference between on-drug and off-drug conditions,

(5) analyzes the acquired EEG data again, improving our algorithms to reveal additional information about brain activity and the drug interaction,

(6) presents Stage II analysis results to the drug developer.

Brain Function and Pharmaceuticals: Development, Re-Purposing, and Drug Comparisons using MOST-EEG

There are multiple contexts in which drug investigations using MOST-EEG analysis are suitable.  For example, MOST-EEG can be used for understanding brain function in the context of (1) bringing a new drug to market, (2) re-purposing an existing accepted drug for other applications, (3) comparing how multiple drugs affect the brain.