Science Market Update

The NIH has just announced $5.3M in two new awards through the Autism Centers of Excellence (ACE) program to support autism research studies led by two University of California investigative teams, at UCLA and the UC Davis Medical Center MIND Institute. ACE funding is earmarked for large, multi-disciplinary studies into the origins of autism spectrum neurological disorders and avenues for their treatment. In the case of the two latest awardees, one is a clinical behavioral study and one is a study of genetic variants. The $5.3M is initial one-year funding, with extensions of up to five years. The ACE program includes both centers and networks. Centers are made up of multiple investigators at one site working together on a specific research problem; networks include investigative teams from different sites engaged in a focused study. Both UCLA and UC Davis are ACE centers and will lead the current research projects, though in collaboration with colleagues at other research institutions, namely Harvard, UW, Vanderbilt, Emory, Johns Hopkins, and Yale. As with all ACE research, data and findings are collected centrally by the NIH to maximize their availability to the larger research community.

2012 was a rough year for two important biorepositories. In October, Hurricane Sandy wiped out power to New York University's main research building, leading to the loss of precious biological samples and hundreds of lab rodents. Earlier in the year, the Harvard University Brain Resource Center at McLean Hospital in Boston suffered a similar catastrophe when a freezer failure led to the compromise of 147 brain tissue samples. 54 of those were specifically for autism research, and the loss has been felt all over the country. As a recent episode of NPR's Morning Edition reported, post-mortem brain tissue samples from autism sufferers are in short supply already and have been for a long time. That autism research is able to make major advances in understanding the neurodisorder is especially impressive given the shortage of these samples. One such triumph has come out of the University of California San Diego's Autism Center of Excellence within the UCSD School of Medicine.

The University of Illinois at Chicago was recently awarded  $9.6 million in the form of a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish an Autism Center of Excellence. The center will be one of five funded centers in the United States, and it is the only one in the Midwest. Nationally, the NIH awards $100 million for the Autism Centers of Excellence research program.

If you watch the evening news in Northern California, it's not unusual to hear the results of studies being done at Sacramento's UC Davis Medical Center campus, especially if those results are raising eyebrows. But an autism study out of the M.I.N.D. Institute at UCDMC has gone national recently, appearing on dozens of media outlets, as well as in Monday's issue of the journal Pediatrics.  The news? Research study results showing a corellation between a mother's obesity during pregnancy and increased risk for autism in her child. More specifically, women with metabolic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and hypertension were 1.6 times more likely to have children with autism spectrum disorders than healthy women.

Michael E. Zwick is a geneticist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, and his recently published study in October's Genomics journal on Identifying Autism Susceptibility Genes explores a new PCR technology for rapid, targeted, and highly accurate sequencing and identification of novel genetic variants affecting X chromosome genes.  Autism is four times more common in men, who possess only one copy of the X chromosome, and Zwick's research explores this possible correlation.

A team of Genomics Researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle have recently uncovered several sporadic gene mutations in the protein producing areas of the genome, called the exome, that may be linked to autism spectrum disorders. The scientists used the latest molecular biology techniques as well as parallel sequencing to simultaneously examine the exomes of several children with a certain form of autism.