SFARI is pleased to announce that it has awarded four grants in response to the Novel Outcome Measures for ASD Clinical Trials request for applications. These grants will support research that aims to develop and validate objective measures for use in clinical trials targeting core symptoms of ASD and disruptive behavioral symptoms commonly reported in individuals with ASD.

SFARI launched a request for applications in early 2015 that sought proposals to develop medium- and high-throughput screens to test the functional effects of de novo missense variants identified in the Simons Simplex Collection and other autism cohorts. Here, SFARI Senior Scientist Alan Packer discusses the proposals that were selected for funding as well as highlighting recent papers that have provided functional evidence for missense variants contributing to autism and other disorders.

SFARI is pleased to announce that it has awarded five grants in response to the Functional Screen of Autism-Associated Variants request for applications. These grants will support the development of medium- and high-throughput screens to test the functional effects of missense variants identified in the Simons Simplex Collection and other autism cohorts.

SFARI is pleased to announce that it has awarded five grants in response to the Whole-Genome Analysis for Autism Risk Variants request for applications. We are also announcing plans for the release of whole-genome sequencing data from the Simons Simplex Collection (SSC) for analysis by the entire research community.

SFARI is pleased to announce that it has awarded 28 grants (15 Pilot Awards and 13 Research Awards) in response to the 2015 Pilot and Research Awards request for applications. 

Simons Foundation and Autism Speaks have entered into an agreement with the National Institutes of Health to align two of the world’s largest repositories of donated postmortem brain tissue for medical research: Autism BrainNet and the NIH NeuroBioBank.

Lectures and symposium presentations that will be given by SFARI Investigators at Neuroscience 2015 in Chicago (17-21 October 2015) are highlighted.

Today, we’re announcing our annual request for applications (RFA) for SFARI Pilot and Research Awards. Letters of intent (LOIs), the short statements that precede full applications, are due no later than 9 October, 2015. As we do every year, we’ve updated this column to provide a better picture of how the SFARI science team makes decisions on research proposals.

SFARI held its seventh science meeting from April 12-14, gathering together more than 100 SFARI-supported autism researchers.

The Simons Foundation is supporting the launch of the Kaiser Permanente Autism Family Research Bank, a project to gather genetic material from 5,000 families who have a child with autism.