BU prof. receives grant to examine autistic children

Boston University announced Wednesday that it will be establishing an Autism Center of Excellence with a $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Psychology professor Helen Tager-Flusberg, director of research on autism and developmental disorders, will head the new center.

Research will focus on autistic patients with limited speech skills, said Frank Guenther, one of the principal investigators for the center.

“The overarching goal is to get a better understanding of the problems with speech in a subset of children with autism that are referred to as barely verbal children,” Guenther said. “These kids say very few, maybe no words at all, even though they’re well past the ages that normally would lead to that.”

Autism spectrum disorders, or ASD, are relatively common, particularly in children.

“The disorders are complex developmental disorders that affect how a person behaves, interacts with others, communicates and learns,” according to the NIH grant press release. “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ASD affects approximately 1 in 88 children in the United States.”

College of Arts and Sciences Associate Dean for Research and Outreach James Jackson said renovations must take place before the center opens, but the center should be open in the spring.

“I believe she [Tager-Flusberg is] hoping to get things up and running by Jan. 1,” he said. “We are now identifying that appropriate space and the university has committed to renovating space and providing it for her.”

Guenther said that barely verbal autism is one of the most serious issues on the autistic spectrum, as it limits the ability to communicate with other people.

He said the center will focus on the effects of auditory monitor-mapping training, which uses various auditory techniques, such as singing and electronic drums, to strengthen speech-related connections in the brain.

“We expect therapy to improve the strength of this pathway, and that improvement we believe, will lead to improved production, speech production in these kids, producing more words,” Guenther said. “This therapy has been shown in the past, actually, to engage autistic children and get them to produce words.”

He said the center will allow BU to produce cutting-edge research on this type of therapy.

“To date, there have only been a few children that have gone through the therapy,” he said. “What the mechanisms are and how they’re being changed and how effective the therapy is, is something we’re hoping to better characterize.”

BU is one of three universities nationwide that will establish a center with the grant funds, along with University of California, Los Angeles and Emory University.

“[The BU] research team will use brain-imaging technologies in an effort to understand why these individuals do not learn to speak, with the goal of helping them to overcome this limitation,” according to the NIH release. “The research team will also test new approaches to help young children with ASD acquire language.”

Jackson said the center will help strengthen BU’s reputation as a major research university.

“We have a lot of strengths in the field, and what [Professor Tager-Flusberg] has done is bring them together,” he said. “These Centers for Excellence are very competitive, and we hope to build on this Center for Excellence to make BU the go-to place for this sort of autism research.”