For investigators in NIH’s autism initiative, funding comes with a ‘big spotlight’

It’s unusual for a director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to give a great deal of attention to a single $50 million research project. But in recent weeks, Jay Bhattacharya has repeatedly touted his agency’s Autism Data Science Initiative (ADSI), which launched in September 2025 and funds roughly a dozen research projects that seek environmental causes of autism using large data sets. The NIH effort, which held its first public webinar this week, supports a cohort of established scientists that others in the field say are doing serious research. But their work is happening in a charged environment where both President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have made unfounded claims about autism’s causes, including linking it to childhood vaccines. As a result, ADSI has from its inception been closely scrutinized by researchers and advocates concerned about political interference in science. At yesterday’s meeting, investigators behind the funded projects mostly elaborated on their study plans, progress preparing for data collection or analysis, and work with the community advisory board that NIH requires for each ADSI project. It is strange for NIH officials to schedule public presentations only 1 year into researchers’ projects, before they have much data, says Joseph Piven, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine and collaborator on an ADSI project. But the initiative has gotten outsized publicity from the start. Finding the roots of autism has long been a priority of Kennedy’s, and many researchers feared that ADSI would perpetuate research into disputed environmental factors even as HHS cut numerous existing autism grants and research projects. HHS announced ADSI weeks after Kennedy promised to find the environmental cause of autism by September 2025 and “eliminate those exposures.” In September, HHS revealed the 13 award recipients in a press release that also suggested links between acetaminophen (Tylenol) use during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental disorders—an assertion for which there is little evidence. More recently, Bhattacharya invoked ADSI as he stood behind Trump on 10 August at the signing of an executive order that seeks to reduce the number of vaccines administered to children. “We’ve given permission to scientists to honestly answer this question for the first time,” Bhattacharya said at the signing. (He often cites a statistic that autism rates have skyrocketed from one in 2000 births in the 1970s to one in 31 today—a change most scientists attribute primarily to broadened diagnostic criteria and improved screening methods.) “We were initially concerned that [ADSI] would be $50 million toward vaccine [injury] research,” says Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation. Autism research advocates—and some ADSI grant recipients—also say NIH’s process for selecting among the applications was unusually opaque. But Singer says the research teams chosen for the grants conduct rigorous science and are led by respected autism experts. “We were pleasantly surprised when we saw the list,” she says. Psychologist Helen Tager-Flusberg of Boston University, who founded the Coalition of Autism Scientists to oppose government interference in research, says Bhattacharya did a good job maintaining the program’s scientific integrity in the face of pressure from the White House and HHS, which oversees NIH. “He was given a mandate to come up with a plan to study autism with almost no time to do it,” she says. The projects presented at yesterday’s webinar are wide-ranging. Piven is studying brain organoids built with stem cells from children who may have a genetic predisposition to autism because their older siblings have the condition, in hopes of finding interactions between environmental contaminants and certain genetic variants. A team led by computational psychiatry researcher Amy Cochran at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is analyzing thousands of health records from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other sources to calculate whether 14 variables, including antidepressant use during pregnancy, parental age, and gestational diabetes, are statistically likely causes of autism. Cochran says the team chose a mixture of variables known to have links to autism and those, like the antidepressants, “that we think the public would benefit from knowing whether there is no kind of association.” Some of the ADSI projects include details about childhood vaccines as part of the health records analyzed, but none makes vaccination its focus. Epidemiologist Kristen Lyall of Drexel University says some researchers were initially cautious about applying for the NIH grants, given the political landscape. But ultimately, she says, “people felt it’s important to be at the table and to be part of the cautious and responsible interpretation of findings.” Her ADSI project is analyzing data from about 10,000 pairs of mothers and children to determine whether diet during pregnancy affects neurodevelopment and the metabolic pathways that might be involved, as well as how a child’s diet can affect the severity of their autism. A unique aspect of ADSI is the requirement that an outside team at a “verification center,” either at Baylor College of Medicine or Weill-Cornell Medicine, repeat each of the 11 other groups’ analyses using the same data and methods. It is the first time that a national project has had validation built in from the beginning, researchers said at the NIH event. Neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles says he is glad to have external researchers checking his work. His ADSI project is screening 4700 compounds on neurons and neural precursor cells to see which molecular pathways each chemical affects and whether those pathways are linked to autism. The researchers will then test the compounds with the largest effects in cells from hundreds of people with and without autism and look at epidemiological data to see whether the mothers of children with neurodevelopmental disorders were exposed to any of these chemicals. Any environmental contributors to autism risk are likely to be very small, ADSI researchers say. Autism is known to be about 80% inherited, with an additional 10% to 15% of cases caused by new mutations that weren’t preexisting in the parents’ genomes, Geschwind says. “That leaves a tiny potential space for environmental effects.” The ADSI grants last either 2 or 3 years, and researchers hope to release findings by then. The grantees Science spoke with say they have encountered no political interference, although they do worry that their eventual results could be misinterpreted. “There’s clearly a big spotlight on the project,” says Jason Stein, a geneticist at UNC and principal investigator on the organoid project. “So we feel a responsibility to do a good job.”