ARIA Awards Boston Children’s $17.25 Million for Autism Trial Network

Three Hospitals, One Day, One Number

Boston Children’s Hospital has been awarded up to $17.25 million from Aligning Research to Impact Autism (ARIA) to serve as one of the initial sites in the IMPACT Network, a five-year international effort to accelerate clinical trials for children with profound autism and genetically defined neurodevelopmental conditions, according to a hospital press release published June 11.

The grant is not unique to Boston. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Texas Children’s Hospital, through Baylor College of Medicine, each announced identical $17.25 million IMPACT site awards on the same day, according to separate press releases from those institutions. The coordinated rollout signals that ARIA is activating its network simultaneously rather than sequentially.

ARIA is funded by the Sergey Brin Family Foundation. Its scientific director is Matthew State, chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCSF.

What the Network Will Study

The IMPACT-Ready Study, the network’s first protocol, is a short-term natural history and clinical endpoint study. Its first cohort targets six genetic conditions associated with autism: ARID1B, CHD2, GRIN2B, RNU4-2, SCN2A, and SLC6A1-related disorders, according to the Boston Children’s press release. A second cohort will enroll children with profound autism who do not have an identified genetic cause.

Each site is expected to enroll a minimum of 125 participants for longitudinal follow-up, according to a December 2025 announcement from UCLA. Wave 1 enrollment is expected to begin on a rolling basis by the end of 2026, with Wave 1b in 2027 and Wave 2 in 2028, per ARIA’s published timeline.

No FDA-approved drug targets the core symptoms of autism, including communication deficits, social differences, and repetitive behaviors. Only risperidone and aripiprazole are approved for irritability associated with ASD, not for core features. That gap is the premise of the network: build the trial-readiness infrastructure so that when candidate therapies emerge, investigators can test them quickly in a well-characterized population.

Boston Children’s Dual Role

Boston Children’s carries a second role beyond its site grant. The hospital co-leads the IMPACT Network’s Clinical Coordinating Center (CCC) with UCLA, funded by a separate $7.5 million ARIA grant announced in December 2025, according to a Boston Children’s press release on EurekAlert. UCLA received a separate $7.5 million CCC grant, per UCLA’s newsroom. The CCC is co-led by Mustafa Sahin, neurologist-in-chief at Boston Children’s, and Shafali Jeste, chair and executive medical director of pediatrics at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

Three principal investigators lead the Boston site. Siddharth Srivastava, a pediatric neurologist specializing in neurogenetics, is the lead PI. Matthew Siegel, chief of clinical enterprise at Boston Children’s and a member of the NIH Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, leads clinical research. Susan Faja, whose work focuses on electrophysiological biomarkers in autism, leads biomarker research.

“By building a coordinated, short-term study of this scale, we can accelerate clinical trial readiness for genetic neurodevelopmental conditions and children with profound autism, who are underserved.” – Siddharth Srivastava, MD, Lead PI, IMPACT Boston (2026)

“This will be the largest study of profound autism ever performed,” Siegel said in the press release, “and is a historic step in bringing equitable opportunities to our children and families with some of the greatest need.”

Funding Context

The IMPACT Network operates as an independent, philanthropy-funded effort, distinct from federal research channels. That distinction carries weight: NIH spending on autism-related research fell to an estimated $116 million in the first four months of 2025, down from $147 million in the same period in 2024 and 26% below the prior four-year average, according to a Reuters analysis of NIH data reported by Disability Scoop in June 2025.

Brin gave more than $1.1 billion to Parkinson’s disease research by 2022, according to Forbes, with annual grants continuing at scale since, including $281 million to Parkinson’s research in 2024 alone, according to Inside Philanthropy. ARIA represents his entry into autism research. The CDC’s most recent surveillance data, published in April 2025, identified autism in 1 in 31 children aged 8, or 3.2%. A 2023 CDC study found that 26.7% of children with autism meet the criteria for profound autism, defined by the Lancet Commission in late 2021 as nonverbal, minimally verbal, or having an IQ below 50.

Wave 1 recruitment across IMPACT sites is expected to begin by the end of 2026, according to ARIA’s published timeline.

AT A GLANCE

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