# Adapting Biomarker Assays for Individuals with Autism and Intellectual Disability

> **NIH NIH R21** · YALE UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $209,375

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
The field of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) research lacks objective, sensitive quantifications of
symptomatology with sufficient evidence to justify use as biomarkers in clinical trials. In the current proposal we
investigate two promising markers, neural response to faces, measured by electroencephalogram (EEG), and
visual attention to faces, measured by eye-tracking (ET). Published work and our preliminary data indicate that
these measures: reflect clinically meaningful differences in the core symptoms of ASD, both by discriminating
groups with ASD from those with typical development (TD) and by correlating with symptomatology in
individuals with ASD; have strong test-retest reliability; demonstrate sensitivity to change in clinical status, both
in the context of pharmacological and behavioral intervention; are collected by objective, automated tools not
vulnerable to issues associated with inter-rater or inter-operator reliability; are minimally invasive and highly
tolerable and therefore applicable across a wide range of ages and functional levels, with acceptable burden
for participants and families; are collected using economical and accessible technologies that are scalable for
large multisite studies with potential utility in the near term. Despite the promise of these biomarkers, their
appropriateness in individuals with ASD and intellectual disability (ASD+ID) is poorly understood. In this
application, we propose a novel integration of technologies and an innovative experimental approach to
investigate these promising biomarkers in this critically understudied population. We leverage two
complementary lines of research developed by the PIs: Dr. McPartland's Autism Biomarkers Consortium for
Clinical Trials (ABC-CT), a multisite study collecting large samples of highly reliable EEG and ET data in
children with ASD, and Dr. Naples' suite of gaze- and behaviorally-contingent technologies permitting
concurrent collection of ET and EEG data in individuals with severe ID. The proposed work will incorporate
robust ABC-CT experiments into an innovative experimental approach to study 30 6-11 year old children with
ASD+ID and a matched sample of 30 individuals with ID without ASD. We test the hypotheses that individuals
with ASD+ID will display longer latency of the N170 event-related potential (ERP) to human faces and reduced
proportion of looking time to human faces in static social scenes relative to individuals with ID without ASD and
that face N170 and visual attention to faces will correlate with clinician and caregiver ratings of social-
communicative function. This innovative project uses a suite of contingent technologies to acclimate
participants to the testing environment and apparatus, to attenuate motion, to permit real time feedback on
data quality to prioritize stimulus delivery, and to support post-processing of motion artifact using computer
vision derived motion estimates. By adapting robust markers for ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10021720
- **Project number:** 5R21MH122202-02
- **Recipient organization:** YALE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** James Charles McPartland
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $209,375
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-09-23 → 2022-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10021720

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10021720, Adapting Biomarker Assays for Individuals with Autism and Intellectual Disability (5R21MH122202-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10021720. Licensed CC0.

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