NeuroVigil is also building what Dr. Low calls a "large database" of brain records from patients around the world. Dr. Low, currently visiting MIT, says NeuroVigil and MIT are exploring how to work together on this database. "Our goal is to build the biggest library of EEGs to then screen them for these biomarkers," says Dr. Low. "We could then screen incoming data against the large library of biomarkers to tell if someone's doing fine or having a disturbance in the brain they would not otherwise know about."

The preliminary technology behind NeuroVigil got its start when Dr. Low was working as a graduate student at the famed Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. It was there he says he jotted down the business plan at his lab bench. "As a result, NeuroVigil won a quarter million dollars in seed funding on a Wednesday and another $30,000 dollars three days later," he explains. "The venture eventually got backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Howard Morgan and Irwin Jacobs, co-founder of QUALCOMM," he adds. But besides the "applied science," the "pure science" aspects of the enterprise aren't entirely lost; after all, Dr. Low holds academic appointments at MIT, as well as at Salk and Stanford University.

A New Sleep State?

What ultimately might be the most important basic research finding of his work may not help fill the coffers of Big Pharma -- Dr. Low believes he may have found a new human sleep state.

Some caution is in order, according to Dr. Low: While the paper laying out this data is not published yet, which means the scientific community has not had a chance to really evaluate the evidence yet, Dr. Low did recently report a new sleep state in animals, in an a peer-reviewed article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year and he did report preliminary data on the possible new human sleep state, in an address at the Annual Society for Neuroscience meeting last year in Washington, DC. If this works out, Dr. Low's discovery could be revolutionary, for by analyzing this sleep stage, Dr. Low says they may apparently do what was only thought possible with sophisticated DNA assays: have a measure of genetic similarity.

As Dr. Low explained at TEDMED, twins appear to have a striking similarity when examined in this sleep state. "There's a very strong concordance," he says. "This is very exciting to us. It means now there may be a way to assess genetic similarity, just with brainwaves."

NeuroVigil has many projects in the works to look at the effect of drugs at very low dosages on the brain. Currently, most brain recording studies in animals are invasive, and require drilling into, for instance, a rat's brain to place an electrode directly on the tissue. "By forgoing very invasive procedures," Dr. Low says, "you make it more comfortable for the animals, of course, and it won't require a tech who has to do brain surgeries." In another presentation at last year's Society for Neuroscience meeting, Dr. Low reported on preliminary results on using advanced mathematics to make the need for invasive work unnecessary.

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