Founded in 2016, SPARK is the largest autism research program in the world. I’ve been a member of SPARK since the very beginning and today I am talking with Dr. Pamela Feliciano, the scientific director. Dr. Feliciano is also a senior scientist at SFARI, the largest private funder of autism research in the US.
SPARK for autism completes studies on the questions of the genetic component in autism. Early on in SPARK, my family did the saliva test in which they sequence your DNA and provide results to participants in which genetic components are found. Providing families with this knowledge allows them to understand the heritability of autism in their family and may even help them catch and intervene for autism in the future children in their lives.
Surveys and partnership surveys allow SPARK to build data to support autism families and better understand patterns in the community. Even during COVID, I received several surveys about the pandemic and how it was affecting our family. Dr. Feliciano explained that the data from the surveys allowed them to understand a wide scope of information involving autism such as how lockdown affected services and diagnostics.
There is definitely a genetic component to autism, but can it be reversed? I follow the work of Dr. Ami Klin and he agrees that while genetic markers for autism can’t be changed, symptoms such as speech delays and intellectual disabilities can certainly be caught and fixed in many cases. Dr. Feliciano, shares that SPARK hopes to provide biological support to kids with autism, this means finding out what caused their autism and how to find the right medications to make their lives easier and raise their quality of life.
Autism affects a very large population and yet we still don’t know much about it. Research for this community is so important. You can find out more and become a part of future studies at SPARKforautism.org.
As Scientific Director of SPARKforAutism.org, Dr. Pamela Feliciano helps lead the effort to build the largest autism research cohort in the US, which has enrolled over 60,000 individuals with autism. Dr. Pamela Feliciano works with a consortium of researchers that are analyzing genomic data from tens of thousands of participants. She also manages a unique aspect of SPARK–returning genetic results related to autism to individual participants.
Dr. Pamela is also a senior scientist at SFARI, the largest private funder of autism research in the US. At SFARI, she has been involved in efforts to fund the development of objective outcome measures for autism clinical trials. Previously, Dr. Pamela was a senior editor at Nature Genetics, where she was responsible for managing the peer review and decision process of research publications in all areas of genetics. Dr. Pamela has a B.S. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. She is also the mother of a teenager with autism.
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