Updates from the past few months
As always, the Wall Lab has been very busy these past few months! Here are some exciting updates:
Two new papers have been accepted for publication. First, the iHart team recently published a paper to the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing entitled “De Novo Mutations in Autism Implicate the Synaptic Elimination Network,” which points to deregulation in synaptic elimination as a potential pathogenic mechanism for ASD. In addition, look out for another recently accepted paper that will be published soon in Translational Psychiatry! This paper, entitled “Crowdsourced validation of a machine learning classification system for autism and ADHD,” validates a screening tool with >96% accuracy to distinguish ASD from ADHD. Congratulations to the authors of these papers!
We also have some upcoming conferences and presentations that our lab will be attending. The Wall Lab is giving a table presentation at the 10th Annual Autism Spectrum Disorders Update at Stanford University on March 25th, 2017, which focuses on new research and services for individuals with autism and their parents, educators, and care providers. We will be giving a demonstration of two of our projects, Autism Glass and GapMap.
From May 10-13 in San Francisco, The International Meeting for Autism Research is taking place, and the Autism Glass team is attending! This is an annual scientific meeting to exchange scientific progress in ASD research from around the globe. The Autism Glass team will have a poster presentation along with an Autism Glass demonstration.
In addition to the above conferences and papers, here are some quick updates from several of our projects:
The Autism Glass team has been very busy. In addition to being nominated as a Katerva Award finalist and their newly redone website, they have three papers in review for preliminary studies that finished up last year, and their randomized control trial is currently underway. The study is halfway through their participant recruitment goal - If you’re interested in participating, be sure to fill out our screening questionnaire!
Likewise, GapMap is almost ready to go live to start collecting data for a more accurate estimate of autism prevalence in the US! We are very excited to launch in the next coming months. Please check back on the website for our launch!
Our Bangladesh Study, aiming to identify and diagnose every child with autism in Bangladesh before the age of 4 by analyzing mobile home videos and a short caregiver-directed questionnaire via machine learning, was recently awarded two grants: one from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation and the other from Stanford Predictives and Diagnostics Accelerator! We are incredibly excited to be collaborating with Drs. Gary Darmstadt of Stanford University and Nalia Khan of Dhaka Shishu Children’s Hospital on this project.
Additionally, the Microbiome Project has recently finished up sending back its participants’ sequenced results and a paper is currently underway! Check out this press article from KQED published last October to learn more about the project.
And lastly, we are starting up another small study to examine how well parents with children with ASD can distinguish ASD in comparison to people without a child with ASD. We expect this to help us validate our participants’ ASD diagnoses in an accurate yet efficient way.
Check back soon for more exciting updates!