Autism is the fastest growing developmental disability in the country, yet it is notoriously difficult to study and treat.
To help address this problem, the National Institute of Health (NIH) has donated $3 million to the Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC Children’s), providing the grant over five years to support the generation, investigation and storage of neural stem cells derived from the skin of children living with autism.
This non-invasive strategy – which will help researchers to study the impact of autism on the developing brain – will build the first repository of neural cells from living patients. Until recently, the only way to acquire these stem cells was to harvest them from the brains of people with autism after their deaths.
The grant, which was awarded through the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, will go to CHOC Children’s National Human Neural Stem Cell Resource program and is the largest federally funded basic science research grant CHOC Children’s has ever received.
"This is a completely novel approach to studying the neurobiology of autism and the first time we’ll be able to do so with neural cells actually derived from large numbers of children living with the condition," said Philip H. Schwartz, Ph.D., principal investigator on the NIH grant and founding director of the National Human Neural Stem Cell Resource. "We hope to confirm over the next several years that neural cells generated from these donated fibroblasts can provide a viable experimental model that will yield insights about the origins, diagnosis, and treatment of autism."
All data derived from this research will be available to the entire scientific community, for use in helping to understand, diagnose, treat and prevent autism.
Approximately one in 150 children born in the U.S. is autistic, a rate that grows 10 percent to 17 percent every year, according to the Autism Society of America.