Dr. Conor Liston, an assistant professor in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College, has received a 2014 Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award from The Hartwell Foundation.
The award is for $100,000 direct cost per year for three years and will support Dr. Liston's research to develop and test biomarkers in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, a neurodevelopmental syndrome characterized by a variety of deficits in social interaction and communication. Dr. Liston and his research team have previously developed neuroimaging biomarkers for subtypes of depression and other mood disorders and with support from The Hartwell Foundation will seek to extend their approach to autism.
"My research team has lots of preliminary data suggesting this is going to be successful, but it's really only through the generosity of The Hartwell Foundation that I can lead this early stage work and extend it in a new direction to help children," said Dr. Liston, who was recently featured in Episode 2 of the online video series Inside Medicine at Weill Cornell. "This award provides critical support and without it, this important research likely would not happen."
The Hartwell Foundation's mission is to fund early-stage, innovative and cutting-edge biomedical research to benefit children in the United States. This year, awards went to 12 researchers, representing 10 institutions. In addition, for each nominee selected for the Individual Biomedical Research Award, the sponsoring participating institution received a Hartwell Fellowship to fund one postdoctoral candidate of his or her choice who exemplifies the foundation's values. Weill Cornell will receive funding for one postdoctoral candidate for two years, at $50,000 direct cost per year. The fellowship supports scientists and biomedical engineers who have completed a Ph.D. or equivalent doctorate and are still in the early stages of career development.
An estimated one in 68 children in the United States are affected by autism spectrum disorder, and despite extensive research on the condition, its causes and underlying functional changes in the brain that accompany it, remain unclear. Dr. Liston's research seeks to answer some of the outstanding questions about how autism works and presents in the brain. He plans to start the project by developing neuroimaging biomarkers of autism spectrum disorder using an existing dataset that includes brain scans and information about specific types of clinical symptoms in children with autism. Using only scans from patients who are 10 to 16 years old, Dr. Liston and his team will look for abnormal connections in circuits within the prefrontal cortex, which supports cognition, social behavior and emotion recognition, and identify atypical patterns of connectivity associated with specific symptoms of autism within this population.
"It's just like how you can have a cough and I can have a cough and a third person can have a cough, and all of these coughs can be caused by very different things, like an allergy, a cold virus, or bacterial pneumonia," Dr. Liston said. "It's probably the same for patients with autism. We just don't know yet what those causes are, so what we're trying to do in the lab is first identify subgroups of people who have similarities in their symptoms and root causes."
After defining autism subgroups, Dr. Liston's group will work to identify corresponding neuroimaging biomarkers. He will then test the predicted biomarkers against a new data set using brain scans from 75 children and adolescents with autism. This phase of the research will be in close collaboration with Dr. Catherine Lord, an internationally renowned autism expert and founding director of the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain, a collaboration between Weill Cornell Medical College, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
The second part of the project will also involve examining animal models of established autism subtypes. This part of the project will test how changes in brain circuit connectivity will affect autism-related behaviors. If successful, it may lead to targeted treatment approaches that might normalize the affected brain circuits.
"Our long-term goal is to develop personalized medicine for neuropsychiatric conditions," Dr. Liston said, referring to the goal of customizing treatments for each patient rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
"If Conor is successful identifying neuroimaging biomarkers of ASD subtypes, it has the potential to transform clinical care by informing difficult diagnostic questions, like distinguishing moderate and high functioning ASD from healthy children," said Fred Dombrose, president of The Hartwell Foundation. "Such biomarkers may also satisfy the need to correctly identify affected children most likely to benefit from specific strategies for early intervention."
The first steps of identifying biomarkers will likely take the entire three-year Hartwell Award term. Dr. Liston and his team hope to later apply their findings long-term to a larger clinical population, where they will seek to develop targeted treatments in specific individuals.