In a quiet but firm acknowledgement of adult stem cell transplant therapy and treatment potential from Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell research, the National Institute of Health has granted Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) three million dollars over five years to collect skin cells from children with autism. The skin cells will be induced into becoming neural cells which can then be studied to gain insight into the autism spectrum and hopefully to find corrective measures.
The NIH-funded research at CHOC will apply this new technology to fibroblasts derived from patients whose autism is clinically very well-characterized, as well as those derived from individuals without the disorder. This efficient, non-invasive method for generating autism neural stem cells from living individuals will allow research that has never been possible before.
It will allow studies of the detailed properties of the induced autism neuron; studies of sufficient statistical power to allow researchers to compare and contrast the effects of autism on the developing human brain; and studies of the influence of environmental factors on these processes. Importantly, all data generated by these investigations will be made widely available to the scientific community. The cells lines themselves will also be made available through the existing CHOC-funded stem cell repository, the NHNSCR, which Dr. Phillip H. Schwartz, Ph.D., created in 2001.
