With new NIH grant, UF strengthens autism research efforts

Backed by seed money from the National Institutes of Health, scientists from across the University of Florida campus are collaborating to develop a major new research focus on autism.

UF has won a $100,000 planning grant that will support the investigators as they develop pilot research projects, enlist other faculty members to study the developmental disorder and begin to establish core research facilities.

Autism is a little-understood condition first diagnosed in childhood but persisting throughout life. It is characterized by difficulties in acquiring language skills, communicating and forming attachments to other people. Most people with autism also function within the mental retardation range of intelligence. In the United States, an estimated one in 2,500 to one in 500 have the disorder, though it can range considerably in severity.

About 20 faculty members in the colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Education, and Liberal Arts and Sciences currently are studying autism. The planning grant is designed to help the UF team prepare to compete for a much larger NIH center grant next year. Five other institutions also received planning funds.

“We haven’t had autism as a major focus, but this will give us a chance to mature as autism researchers and come together as a group,” said Mark H. Lewis, Ph.D., the grant’s principal investigator and a psychiatry professor affiliated with the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute of UF.

Lewis said UF’s expanded efforts will build on existing research strengths that could yield insight into autism. Such strengths include studies of compulsive and self-injurious behaviors, and, in people with mental retardation, abnormal repetitive behaviors.