Government, non-profits, and other private partners are funding a multi-year project to develop and improve clinical research tools to study Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The project will receive a total of $28 million over the next four years to test and measure social impairment in ASD to enable professionals to do a better job evaluating potential behavioral and drug therapies.
ASD is a group of neurodevelopmental disorders affecting social interaction and communication skills that can cause restricted and repetitive behaviors. Approximately, one percent of children throughout the world have an ASD, with each having their own unique combination of symptoms and levels of impairment.
The funding is supported by a Consortium that includes NIH www.nih.gov, the Foundation for NIH www.fnih.org, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) http://sfari.org, and others. The NIH funding comes from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) www.nimh.nih.gov , the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke www.ninds.nih.gov and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development www.nichd.nih.gov.
With James McPartland PhD, of the Yale School of Medicine as the Principal Investigator, the Consortium and research team will conduct a multisite study of preschool (3 to 5 years) and school aged (6-11 years) children both with and without ASD over the course of several months. Research sites include Yale University, Duke University, University of California Los Angeles, University of Washington, and Boston Children’s Hospital.
The researchers will begin by comparing lab-based measures of social impairment to commonly used standardized clinician and caregiver assessments of social function. Next, the researchers will evaluate the potential utility of eye tracking responses and measure brain activity via EEG as biomarkers for future clinical trials.
They will investigate how these two noninvasive and relatively inexpensive biomarker measures relate to their recently validated lab-based measures of social function. Together, these findings will lay the groundwork for ASD researchers to objectively select meaningful subgroups of children to study.
In addition to the behavioral measures and biomarker data, blood samples from subjects and their parents will be studied for use in future genetic studies. Data and resource sharing are key components of this consortium project with all the data generated to be made available to other researchers to view and analyze through the NIH funded National Database for Autism Research http://ndar.nih.gov and the NIMH Repository and Genomics Resource www.nimhgenetics.org.