Very little is known about the neurobiology of childhood disintegrative disorder (CDD), a rare form of late-onset, severe, regressive autism. Abha Gupta plans to recruit families affected by CDD for clinical characterization and the collection of biospecimens for future neurogenetic analysis.

Finding a tool that can quickly and accurately help triage risk of autism is a critical need in the field and can have a large impact on families and clinicians. Stephen Kanne, Antonio Hardan and Micah Mazurek plan to perform a multisite study to evaluate whether a tool called AutismEYES, which assesses an individual’s eye gaze, can provide a quantitative and objective measure to improve ASD identification and track symptom change over time.

Guillermo Sapiro, in collaboration with Geraldine Dawson, seeks to develop and validate automatic, objective and quantitative measurements of social communicative and motor behaviors based on visual attention, affective facial expressions, vocalizations and head movements that can serve as feasible, reliable and sensitive outcome measures in autism clinical trials.