Neuro-immune interactions in autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong developmental condition in which affected individuals suffer from difficulties in social communications and interactions, and display restricted, repetitive behaviours. Immune abnormalities in the peripheral immune system are reported in ASD, however the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. In this research, we will use a multidisciplinary approach for studying ASD, in which we will integrate data from immunology, psychology, genomics, medical history and neurosciences. We will carefully characterize all our cases, including controls, and perform a number of behavioural assessments in order to sub-classify our cases into different severity levels (i.e. controls, mild/moderate ASD or severe ASD). We will study the association of ASD severity levels with the postnatal immune condition through plasma cytokines analysis, flow cytometry and gene expression analysis. Also, we will collect medical history information of maternal and neonatal complications from all our cases and we will correlate these data with our findings from the postnatal immune analyses and ASD severity levels. The immune system also affects brain function and development, and therefore we will generate cortical neurons from the patient-specific reprogrammed cells to further understand the disease mechanisms. We will associate our neuronal findings with the immune data from the same cases, which will give us novel insights on how the two systems interact with each other. Taken together, our study is multidisciplinary which may have the potential in the future to target specific blood immune factors as a novel therapeutic approach for ASD.

Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU)