Year 1

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have a worldwide prevalence of 1% (>1.5 million in the US) and a lifetime cost per affected individual of $3.2M. ASDs are amongst the most heritable of psychiatric disorders. Genome Wide Association studies utilizing samples in the thousands provide only weak evidence for common allele risk effects; positive findings rarely replicate, and genetic effects sizes are small (odds ratios of ~1.1). In contrast, evidence to date for risk or causation conferred by rare variation, particularly rare copy number variants, is very strong. Pathway analyses of the rare mutations implicated and genome-wide transcriptome analysis of brain and blood tissue provide converging evidence that neural-related pathways are central to the development of autism. Core impairments of ASDs, such as imagination and curiosity about the environment, cannot be modeled well in other organisms. The mechanisms underlying ASDs need to be studied in humans and cells that share the genetic background of the patients, such as neurons from patients derived from induced pluripotent cell lines (iPSC).

Our goal was to provide the CIRM repository with samples from 200 well characterized individuals with an ASD and 100 demographically matched controls. To date we have enrolled 63 participants.