On Feb. 2, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta announced a major $21.9 million grant that will fund the Marcus Autism Center’s “largest-ever” study of autism severity causes and treatments among children.
The grant is from the late Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus and the Marcus Foundation. It will go to the CHOA subsidiary, the Marcus Autism Center, founded by Bernie Marcus in 1991.
The study will look at behavior, brain and genomic biomarkers in children across the autism spectrum. Researchers aim to generate new therapies and potentially prevent profound disabilities from happening at all.
It is a major study; 7,500 children from birth to age 12 will participate. Typically, the center treats around 5,000 children with autism and related disorders a year. It works to lower autism diagnosis ages and promote earlier intervention, maximize learning strategies and promote education, and address chronic feeding disorders.
“The goal is to enable precision medicine interventions that will accelerate learning, make symptoms less severe and improve response to treatment in children with profound autism, and possibly even prevent profound disability from emerging in the first place,” Marcus Autism Center Director Dr. Ami Klin said.
Dr. Klin will lead a team of researchers at the center in collaboration with Children’s Behavioral and Mental Health and Neurosciences Research Programs, Emory University’s School of Medicine’s Department of Human Genetics and the Tri-Institutional Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science.
“If successful, our research could usher in a new era of behavior-brain-genomic precision medicine to optimize outcomes of children in a community that cannot wait,” Dr. Klin said.
According to the center, about 620,000 children in the United States have profound autism. They typically require around-the-clock care and support for limited or no verbal communication, profound intellectual disabilities and struggle with daily living.
The team will study profound autism at multiple levels, including behavior, brain networks and basic biology. Using that information, Dr. Klin said the center aims to create new drugs and therapies, support learning, lessen severe symptoms and promote a better quality of life.
“This represents the largest scientific effort to date to study children with profound autism from infancy to early adolescence, and to develop actionable predictors that can improve treatment response, while personalizing treatments and developing new ones,” Dr. Klin said.
He continued, “We hope to generate a moonshot factory of solutions for a community that carries the most severe symptoms of autism and has been underrepresented in autism research.”
