Autism Clinical Trials

Autism Clinical Trials

Research Highlight: Testing and Refining Biomarkers to Support Intervention Research for Children with Autism

There is a need for objective measures—biomarkers—that can separate individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) into subgroups for clinical trials, leading to more predictive and personalized treatment.

The NIH-funded Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT) was established in 2015 to address this need. The goal of the multisite study was to test and refine a set of biomarkers that could be used as reliable, objective measures of variation in social impairment in ASD. Ultimately, the researchers wanted to test and refine these objective measures of social impairment for use in clinical trials, which could help define which individuals with ASD would best respond to particular treatments. Primary analyses of the data were completed in June 2020. Source 7u.