On April 3, UCLA announced that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had awarded Daniel Geschwind, M.D., director of the UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART), a five-year, $10 million Network grant to expand and continue his current research in the genetic causes of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The new research will emphasize further understanding of ASD among African Americans. The award is part of the NIH’s Autism Centers of Excellence (ACE) research program, which supports coordinated research into the causes of ASD, and the discovery of new treatments.
ASDs affect approximately 1 in 88 children in the United States. They are complex developmental disorders that affect how a person behaves, interacts with others, communicates, and learns. The NIH created the ACE Program in 2007 to launch an intense and coordinated research program into the causes of ASD, and to find new treatments. Dr. Geschwind’s award, which will involve networking with other ASD centers around the country, builds on his earlier work identifying genetic variants associated with autism susceptibility, with an important new emphasis: the network aims to recruit at least 600 African American families who have a child diagnosed with an ASD for genetic testing. Nearly all previous research on the genetics of autism has focused on subjects of European descent, rather than African or other ancestries, and it is critical to study different populations to understand if the current genetic findings in ASD can be generalized to a broader population.
Dr. Geschwind, a professor of neurology, psychiatry, and genetics, will look for gene variants associated with autism in Americans with self-reported African ancestry, and then test the genetic risk factors identified in European populations to see what role they may play in the disorder in those of African descent. Because individuals are typically a mix of different ancestries, the group will use statistical methods that enable assigning chromosomal regions to different ancestral origins. Genetic data generated by the study will be made available through the Internet to the larger research community. This new award supports his current ACE Network project, which focuses on the genetics of autism in hopes that findings will inform diagnosis and treatment.
The work will also include an evaluation of disparities in diagnosis and access to care. Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, Washington University, and Yale University will be carrying out this study with UCLA as the coordinator. The NIH award follows on the heels of several large ACE awards to various CART researchers last September. CART was the only NIH ACE Center in the nation to be awarded renewed funding for the next five years. The funding to CART supports ongoing research focused on examining genes' link to behavior, developing clinical interventions for those severely affected by the disorder, and explaining why autism affects more boys than girls.
In conjunction with UCLA CART, this Network grant will help further UCLA’s programs in autism research by approaching it from both a research and clinical perspective. Together, these ACE grants aim to find ways to diagnose patients earlier and to tailor treatments to each individual to create the best outcome.
CART and the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences are part of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, a world leading, interdisciplinary research and education institute devoted to the understanding of complex human behavior and the causes and consequences of neuropsychiatric disorders. The UCLA Department of Neurology, with over 100 faculty members, encompasses more than 20 disease-related research programs, along with large clinical and teaching programs. These programs cover brain mapping and neuroimaging, movement disorders, Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, neurogenetics, nerve and muscle disorders, epilepsy, neuro-oncology, neurotology, neuropsychology, headaches and migraines, neurorehabilitation, and neurovascular disorders.
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