Developing therapies for ASD with your help!

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Hello! I represent group of scientists from Moscow and Los Angeles, developing new neuropeptides supplement for childhood autism correction. We believe that natural approach could be really effective and with your help we are going to prove it!
Please follow our project's "Can we fight against autism using peptide approach?" on Experiment scientific croudfunding platform, and if you like it, please share it on your fb page. Thank you!

I would use a combination cognitive-behavioral approach. Reality-testing is important.

Yes, of course, we will use complex approach in clinical practice. But at the moment we are in the beginning and we need perform this preliminary experiments on lab animals.

Hasn't Obama sanctioned Russian peptides? But no problem, I will donate my autistic child. Just be sure to clean his cage at least once a week, he can be messy.

Sorry, twisted autistic humor. Also, if I could make a suggestion (or two) to you, I think you will find many autistic people are against animal testing, so you might want to sweep that under the rug somehow. Furthermore, I suspect that many autistic people will object you referring to autism as a disease (whether or not the term is clinically correct) in the caption of that video with the emotional music that makes me want to go out and donate my disability check to you (my attempt at sarcasm). oh I almost forgot, if you could provide some actual links to your respective universities and/or some kind of credible documentation your project might seem like less of a scam out of a Nigerian playbook. Oh yes, and the last thing, have you tried hitting up autism speaks for money?

https://experiment.com/projects/can-we-fight-against-autism-using-peptide-approach

How about a cure for cancer, pneumonia or the common cold?

Well, there are a lot of good drugs for common cold. As for the other diseases, little not our profile. But I am sure that there are a huge amount of scientific groups that are working on these problems. So, the solution someday will be found.

Ouch, It would be very sad.

I apologize, but I can't publish normal links because of the forum rules (I need 2 days more).

First of all, not only autistic people are against animal testing, but there is no another way to develop new drug. If you are interested about why do we need to work with laboratory animals, you can find some information here: ht tp://w w w. biomedcentral. c om/1471-2377/9/S1/S2
And about rodent models: ht t p://w w w. researchgate. n et/publication/222678633_Rodent_models_for_autism_A_critical_review

As for terminology, we do not want offend anyone, but in our opinion autism is a disease: ht tp://w w w. autismspeaks. o rg/what-autism
About the video, we realize that we are a bit exaggerated, but the problem is still there, and we think that we can explore an interesting solution.

Yep, but we assumed that the publication on the website experiment. c om should solve such questions. The experts of this crowdfunding platform filtered all projects and cut obviously unscientific, however, we can provide some review from our faculty professors in a few days. You can read about our faculty here (it's in russian, but i think that google translate will successfully cope with the translation): ht tp:// w w w. bio.msu. ru/dict/view. php?ID=18
The most of our publications are in russian, but some of them are indexed by pubmed, so you can easily find them: ht tp://w w w. ncbi.nlm.nih. g ov/pubmed/?term=malyshev+a.v.

Not yet, but we will try. Thank you.

I have not done a full bibliographical study on that topic, but am quite skeptical of animal models of autism. Do you have any example of any progress in the research on human autism (learning to either clinical applications or significant advances in the way autism is understood) coming from such models? It seems that when nobody knows precisely what combination of factors cause autism, subjecting an animal to a treatment that cause somewhat autistic symptoms and then trying to reverse the process (using your peptides or anything else) is not very likely to yield any result that can actually be used for autism therapy. One effect can be the result of many different causes, and it is especially true in neuroscience where what you can observe is only a tiny subset of the phenomenons that are taking place.

Also, about your general plans: you intend to spend 30% of your funds on expensive MRI studies. Do you actually expect to find something you couldn't find by post-mortem analysis and histology?

You are entitled to that opinion, but if you go on quoting Autism Speaks as a reference I think you won't find much support on that forum.

There has been much done via fMRI within autism research.

The only "cure" for autism is for the person with autism to have a successful and happy life with the autism--with therapy aimed at the alleviation of uncomfortable symptoms, and the encouragement of as much independence as possible, for dependence causes many co-morbid problems.

I think genetic, fMRI studies, studies of a neuroscientific nature in general, and studies which originate from various branches of psychology, are useful.

However, OuroborosUK brings up a good point: in neuroscience, "what you can observe is only a tiny subset of the phenomena that are taking place."

Anecdotal, especially longitudinal, studies, which incorporate people with autism as equal partners rather than lab rats, are probably most important in arriving at solutions to the problems experienced by people on the Spectrum.

Let's hope that peptides, if proposed as a "cure" for autism, doesn't have similar effects as lobotomies.

With fMRI some interesting research is conducted indeed, but nothing has gone clinical yet as far as I know and I don't think that kind of research easily transfers from and to pseudo-autistic rats.

And anyway what they want to do here is not fMRI but anatomical studies. In humans they are useful because you usually can't just open the skull of a human being to look inside, unless they are already dead For rats that anyway won't survive the experiments, you can do just that, so the only use I could see for anatomical MRI would be to monitor (hypothetical) changes in brain anatomy throughout the experiment. I was just asking if there is any reason to think such changes could be observed. Otherwise it's 1500$ that can be saved if they don't meet their funding goals.




I agree with you; however not everyone agrees and it is healthy for scientific and medical research to explore all possible directions. Science and ideology don't mix well, and that is always true. I don't agree with this researcher's view on autism and I would challenge any attempt to portray it as a political or medical "truth", but as long as it is merely a work hypothesis I don't see any problem and will do my best to give honest feedback. (I won't give them money, though; I think other approaches, including the ones you refer to, are more promising.) Even if they are wrong about what is the most accurate and ethical way to consider autism, as I think they are, if their research is sound it will be something more we know about autism and everyone will benefit from that whatever their stance on autism.

Wouldn't you agree that anatomical research of that nature is somewhat limited? For one, it is not a study of dynamic evolution, such as what Duchesne (spelling?) found with an acceleration in the increase in brain mass in the first two years of life, thus decreasing the "quality" of axonal connections. For another, wouldn't anatomical research involve a relatively superficial investigation of the gray matter of the brain, minus an investigation of the "white matter" (which, I believe, is very much an unknown quantity).

I'm not an expert, by any means, in autism research. I enjoy that I've learned something from you.

Thank you for your previous responses.

Edited, orginal post deleted:
Opps, this is why I hate reading stuff in columns, it gets confusing & I miss stuff...

You can argue the correctness of such terminology if you want but, as I said previously, you will find that many people on the autism spectrum will find it insulting. Furthermore, I think you may find that using autism speaks to lend credibility to your argument may "backfire" as autism speaks is reviled by most people on the spectrum. But do as you wish.

There's irritation with "Autism Speaks" because they seek a "cure" for autism.

They believe autism is a tragedy, and that there are no redeeming qualities about it. Autism, at times, could be interpreted as "going into oneself in order to emerge, again, into the world."