New MIT research center looks to treat, cure autism

A new, privately funded, multimillion-dollar research center at MIT will try to cure and treat autism by studying new, novel and “far out” treatments.

“NIH wouldn’t support this in a million years, some of the things we have planned,” said Bob Desimone, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, which will oversee the new center.

“We’re thinking of approaches that would involve gene changes, even in adults,” he said. “It’s kind of far out there, but if anybody is going to try it, we are.”

The new Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research is funded by a $20 million donation by Tan and Yang, parents of two children — now adults — who are on the autism spectrum.

“It may not help my children, but at some stage, this is something that needs to be done,” Yang said. “This disorder is not unique to our family. It’s a very difficult disorder to struggle with.”

Tan is an MIT alumnus and chief executive of California computer chip company Broadcom.

The center will dispense with the kind of incremental autism research that is happening nationwide and instead focus on trying to make significant jumps through new technologies such as gene editing with CRISPR/Cas9.

“We could go down some avenues that cost some time and money, but if we don’t investigate some of these dark alleys, no one else will,” Desimone said. “There really could be a game-changer at the end.”

Desimone said federal research grants require a level of proof or progress that the moonshot ideas don’t have.

While many diseases have been addressed in recent years thanks to gene sequencing technology, brain diseases such as autism have not seen the same results. Still, more attention has been paid to the disorder, and technology is getting to the point where there are new avenues to explore, Yang said.

“There is momentum and along the way, there’s new things that are going to be discovered,” she said. “I’m very hopeful,”