United States autism researchers are facing the happy prospect of needing to swell their numbers to take advantage of substantial new funding to investigate the condition. Much of the money is a result of the Children's Health Act, a law passed by Congress in 2000, which, among other things, calls for the creation of five new autism research centers by 2003.

The first two centers funded under the program—Yale University and the University of North Carolina—will split $19 million over the next five years. The money represents a large addition to current National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for autism research, which totaled $56 million last year.

The new centers will build on existing autism research at both institutions by funding several new studies on diagnostic and treatment strategies. For example, researchers at Yale recently found that autistic individuals seem to use the same brain regions whether looking at faces or other objects, whereas normal individuals use different areas of the brain when looking at faces (Arch. Gen. Psychiatry. 331, 57;2000).

Other recent research has focused on identifying genetic factors. “There are several chromosome regions that have been identified as likely to contain genes involved in autism,” says Ami Klin, an associate professor of child psychiatry at Yale and one of the two investigators who will head up that university's new center. But Klin cautions that “the best models of autism predict that we're going to have from maybe five or six to maybe twenty or thirty different genes involved in the condition,” so progress on identifying genes may be slow. All five of the new centers are expected to collect genetic data from patients, which may speed the hunt.

Ironically, Congress may have been spurred to spend more money on the condition by one of the most controversial aspects of autism research: whether the incidence of the condition is increasing. Some epidemiological studies support a rise, but critics have argued that improved awareness and diagnosis may account for much of the change (Nature Med. 7, 645; 2001).

Accelerating research to address these issues, though, requires more than an act of legislation. In order to lay the necessary groundwork, the program that is establishing the centers, called Studies to Advance Autism Research and Treatment (STAART), has proceeded in two steps. First, the NIH gave one-year grants to six institutions to help make them more competitive in autism research. Those institutions and others could then apply for the much larger five-year grants that will actually establish the new centers. “The bottleneck nowadays is how to have enough scientists who are clinicians as well as scientists ... in order to both care for patients and do research,” says Klin. She adds, “we need more people trained in the field” to take full advantage of the new funding.