New Funding Expands Georgia State’s Role in Landmark Autism Research

ATLANTA - Researchers at Georgia State University's Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) Center are expanding their role in some of the largest autism research initiatives to date, thanks to new funding awarded to the Marcus Autism Center, a subsidiary of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.

The increased collaboration brings more of TReNDS' expertise in neuroimaging, data science and artificial intelligence to efforts aimed at understanding autism and developing personalized supports.

"Our team has spent years developing tools that help translate complex brain and biomedical data into meaningful insights," said Distinguished University Professor of Psychology Vince Calhoun, founding director of the TReNDS Center and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Brain Health and Image Analysis. "Working alongside the Marcus Autism Center allows us to apply those capabilities at an unprecedented scale and use our joint skills to move toward more precise, personalized approaches to autism care."

New awards to the Marcus Autism Center include an investment of up to $17.25 million from Aligning Research to Impact Autism (ARIA) that will support participation in the newly formed Innovative Medicine and Precision Approaches to Clinical Trials (IMPACT) Network, an international autism clinical trials consortium. This award is in addition to a recent $21.9 million grant from the Marcus Foundation supporting the largest-ever study of behavioral, brain and genomic biomarkers in children across the autism spectrum and those with related neurodevelopmental conditions.

For the ARIA clinical trials network project, TReNDS is helping build the data and analytics infrastructure needed to learn across multiple studies and sites. This includes integrating measures such as imaging, EEG, eye tracking, wearables, clinical assessments and molecular data in a scalable and reproducible way.

For the Marcus Foundation-funded study, TReNDS is leading the NeuroBridge AI Core, a major component of the project designed to integrate behavioral, brain imaging, physiological, genetic and other biological data into a unified framework for understanding autism. The large-scale nature of this study, which is expected to include approximately 7,500 children ages 5 to 12 over the course of five years, creates an opportunity to move beyond relatively small autism studies and identify patterns that are reproducible across large and diverse groups of children.

Ultimately, researchers hope the work will advance precision medicine for autism by using behavioral, neurological and biological information to better understand why children follow different developmental trajectories and how interventions can be tailored to individual needs.

For the researchers in TReNDS, it also delivers an important opportunity to expand translational research that can put new findings into action.

"We're proud to see how the research expertise at Georgia State is impacting our understanding of autism," said Donald Hamelberg (Ph.D. '01), vice president for Research and Economic Development at Georgia State University. "This collaboration exemplifies how researchers across multiple disciplines can bring together diverse expertise, data science and advanced technologies to address complex challenges in human health."

To learn more about the TReNDS Center, visit trendscenter.org. For more information about Georgia State research and its impact, visit research.gsu.edu.