Autism has many causes, yet no single cause explains why many children and adults have autism. This makes the symptoms of autism difficult, since how somebody responds to treatment might depend on what cause autism in the first place. We this need both better treatments and ways of figuring out which treatments will work for whom. We plan to take innovative new drugs to clinical trial – and have a trial in mice at the same time as the trial in youth. Using mice allows us to isolate some of the individual causes of autism, and we can therefore test whether the drug works better in mice with one particular cause than mice with another. We will also obtain as much information as we can about the youth and the mice participating in our clinical trials to see if there is anything that helps predict who benefits from the drug. Our hope is that these co-clinical trials in youth and mice will let us create individual plans for each patient so that he or she can benefit from new treatments for autism.
