Explore the Agenda

EEG Focus Day

Tuesday, September 15

Pre-Conference Workshop Day

Tuesday, September 15

Day One

Wednesday, September 16

Day Two

Thursday, September 17

9:00 am Chair’s Opening Remarks & Welcome

Scientific Director, AbbVie

Honing Standardization, AI Utility, Dose & Patient Selection to Sharpen EEG Strategy for More Effective Mood Therapeutics

9:20 am Precision Psychiatry 2.0: Reimagining Frameworks, Tools & Clinical Pathways to Deliver Individualized Mental Health Care

Scientific Director, AbbVie
  • Positioning EEG as a scalable, translational biomarker, integrating neural signals with clinical and biological data to improve patient stratification and development decision-making
  • Moving beyond symptom-based diagnoses by leveraging EEG-derived neurophysiological signatures to reduce heterogeneity and define biologically coherent subgroups
  • Translating EEG, digital phenotyping, and AI-enabled analytics from research tools into deployable assets across clinical trials, endpoints, and real-world settings
  • Aligning pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions with EEG-informed neural biomarkers to guide target engagement, dose selection, and personalized treatment strategies

9:50 am EEG & AI to Identify Glutamatergic Responders: A Path to Overcoming Schizophrenia’s Etiologic Heterogeneity

Director, Laboratory for Psychiatric and Molecular Neuroscience, McLean Hospital, Eben S. Draper Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
  • Highlight the limitations of DSM 5 diagnostic categories in schizophrenia and illustrate how etiologic heterogeneity has contributed to repeated failures of mechanistically novel drug candidates
  • Demonstrate how EEG derived cortical activity patterns, paired with AI driven analysis, can provide a mechanistic basis for prospectively identifying patients whose glutamatergic pathology aligns with specific therapeutic mechanisms
  • Present evidence from pomaglumetad Phase 3 re analysis showing that baseline EEG markers can identify a ~20% subgroup with substantial cognitive and negative symptom improvement, revealing responders concealed within a non significant overall trial
  • Outline how ongoing work in schizophrenia and autism aims to validate EEG based responder identification across disorders with shared cortical circuit disruption, supporting a broader precision therapy framework

10:20 am Morning Break

10:50 am Decoding EEG Biomarkers with Biophysical Models: A New Evidence Layer for Neuropsychiatric Drug Development

Professor of Neuroscience, Brown University
  • Explaining how biophysically grounded neural models link EEG signals to underlying cell- and circuit-level mechanisms in health and neuropsychiatric disease
  • Demonstrating how commonly used EEG biomarkers can be mechanistically interpreted to assess whether neurotherapeutics are acting on intended brain circuits
  • Showing how EEG-based circuit modeling can build earlier, translational evidence of target engagement and dosing before human clinical trials
  • Outlining the path from academic tool to pharma-facing platform, including spin-out efforts to support R&D decision-making and future treatment response prediction

11:20 am Roundtable Discussion: Toward True Standardization in EEG: Harmonizing Acquisition, Analysis & Data Infrastructure for Scalable, Regulatory-Ready Use

  • Highlighting ongoing standardization efforts, such as IPEG’s recommendations, and how they provide a valuable foundation for common EEG acquisition and analysis practices
  • Exploring opportunities to increase alignment across industry, academia, and technology partners to reduce variability and support more consistent analytical pipelines
  • Discussing how emerging federated data infrastructures and shared EEG datasets can help establish reproducible, scalable analytical approaches across diverse clinical environments
  • Identifying how unified standards and modern data frameworks can accelerate regulatory confidence, enhance trial comparability, and support broader adoption of EEG-based biomarkers

12:00 pm Lunch

Unlocking the Power of EEG & Sleep Biomarkers to Transform Diagnosis, Treatment Response & Precision Stratification

1:00 pm Decision Grade EEG Biomarkers to De Risk Early Neuropsychiatric Drug Development: Case Study in Fragile X & Schizophrenia

Professor, UC Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
Associate Professor, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
  • Using EEG as a sensitive, translational readout of drug-target engagement in small first in human studies across Fragile X, schizophrenia, and other brain disorders
  • Demonstrating rapid rescue and normalisation of disease relevant EEG signals following acute dosing and linking these changes to clinically meaningful cognitive outcomes
  • Pairing EEG biomarkers with regulatory acceptable endpoints, including NIH Toolbox measures, to strengthen confidence in early proof of concept
  • Applying EEG based responder identification to de risk progression into larger Phase 2 and 3 trials across heterogeneous neuropsychiatric populations

1:30 pm Roundtable Discussion: Establishing Normative EEG Signatures in Defined Psychiatric Subpopulations: Updates from ECMP & the Emerging Precision Landscape

  • Differentiating insomnia subtypes (difficulty initiating vs. maintaining sleep vs. early awakening) and their relevance as biomarkers across depression and anxiety
  • How insomnia signatures may stratify patients, predict symptom trajectories, or serve as endpoints across mood disorder trials
  • Opportunities and pitfalls when using sleep related EEG and behavioral signals to map emotional blunting, anhedonia, and anxiety phenotypes
  • Integrating clinical, sponsor, academic, and technology vendor perspectives to advance insomnia as a validated, scalable biomarker

2:00 pm Afternoon Networking Break

2:30 pm Translating Circuit Biology into Biomarkers: Integrating EEG, Electrophysiology, & Neural Signatures in Drug Development

Vice President & Head of Neurobiology Research, Alkermes
  • Leveraging EEG and complementary neurophysiology approaches to map circuit-level modulation and therapeutic mechanisms
  • Combining immediate-early-gene readouts, single-unit recordings, and local field potentials to construct multi-modal circuit signatures
  • Building translational frameworks that bridge preclinical circuit modulation to human biomarker endpoints
  • Advancing biomarker-driven decision-making to de-risk development and guide dose selection, target engagement, and clinical translatability

3:15 pm Panel Discussion: Evaluating Unmet Needs in Sleep: Navigating EEG Utility & Limitations Across Complex Sleep Architecture

Scientific Director, AbbVie
Chief Scientific Officer, Seaport Therapeutics
Vice President & Head of Neurobiology Research, Alkermes
  • Defining which facets of sleep (onset, maintenance, early awakening, quality, or EEG specific signals) truly matter as clinical biomarkers
  • Understanding the practical and scientific limits of EEG in psychiatric sleep research: specificity, invasiveness, and placebo susceptibility
  • How sponsors (orexin programs, sleep promoting or circadian targeting drugs) and EEG tech vendors interpret sleep architecture in different disease contexts
  • Identifying core unmet needs in insomnia and sleep dysregulation across mood and psychiatric disorders, and what measurement innovation is required

4:00 pm Chair’s Closing Remarks & End of Focus Day

Scientific Director, AbbVie