Over the past four months, a new research initiative has quietly ramped up its investments in autism research.
Aligning Research to Impact Autism (ARIA), launched by the Sergey Brin Family Foundation in 2024, has publicly committed more than $450 million for a range of projects designed to accelerate research into profound autism and potential autism therapies. About $300 million of this funding—an amount that rivals the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s annual autism research budget—has been announced since June.
ARIA’s grants are part of “a significant, increasing trend in private foundation funding for autism in the last few years,” says Helen Tager-Flusberg, director of the Center for Autism Research Excellence at Boston University. She also pointed to the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), which has an annual budget of about $100 million and has contributed around $750 to $760 million to autism research since its inception in 2006. John Spiro, former senior vice president and former senior scientist at SFARI, and SFARI staff scientist Jennifer Foss-Feig serve on advisory boards for ARIA. (The Transmitter is supported by the Simons Foundation but is editorially independent.)
Although historically the federal government has been a consistent presence in autism research funding—and last month the Department of Health and Human Services announced a new autism research program called SPECTRA—the future of federal funding for agencies such as the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration is increasingly uncertain, Tager-Flusberg says. “The scope, integration and size of ARIA is very different from anything that NIH has or could mount,” she says. “ARIA is likely to transform the autism research landscape.”
And “this is the time to make a big investment,” says Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. ARIA’s “historic” announcements come at a time when research is poised to capitalize on years of work identifying the more than 200 genes associated with autism, he says. “We have something to chase now.”
A
RIA’s work is divided across six research hubs, five of which focus on different aspects of biology: protein-protein interactions, human developmental neurobiology, genetic medicines, neurosensing and neuromodulation, and functional communication in people with autism. The IMPACT Network, the sixth hub, unites 20 hospitals and universities to conduct clinical trials that arise from the other hubs’ efforts. The initiative’s structure emphasizes collaboration, with a centralized biobank and data-sharing among researchers.“Our approach is really thinking about how we bring all of these different modular components to the field in a coordinated way to really make a push on answering a number of questions,” says Ekemini Riley, managing director of ARIA. The goal is to “get at the why and the how, so we can develop rational treatments” for autism, she says, adding that “this is just the beginning.”
One of the largest grants to date, $46 million to the University of California, San Francisco’s Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI), is part of the Protein-Protein Interactions Hub. The effort plans to build on earlier work that mapped novel networks of proteins encoded by autism-linked gene variants, though at a much larger scale, says Nevan Krogan, director of QBI and hub co-lead. “This funding allows us to do [protein analysis] more systematically and globally, which is really exciting.”
Krogan says technological advances in gene editing and artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling experimental approaches and resolutions “that we could have only dreamed of 10 years ago” and that can help the hub make therapeutic discoveries.
Another $46 million grant went to Harvard University and Yale University for four projects in the Human Developmental Neurobiology Hub. At Harvard, this research includes growing hundreds of brain organoids from blood samples to model how the brain develops in people with and without autism, beginning in gestation. At Yale, researchers intend to develop a connectome that maps the structure of the developing brain, using human and primate tissue samples. They also plan to conduct single-cell genomic analyses to see how gene expression changes over the course of development.
All three neurobiology hub projects will feed into a Harvard-based AI effort to develop virtual cell models of the developing brain that can offer insights into how drugs could change the course of development, says Paola Arlotta, professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University and hub co-lead. “That’s very difficult, and yet that’s the future we are imagining.”
Arlotta says the opportunity to connect organoid research, cell sequencing and AI with clinical data through ARIA’s IMPACT Network is a key part of what makes this “an opportunity of a lifetime.”
