Today we released the first iteration of our Autism Drug Trial Tracker, which provides interactive, curated information on more than 200 clinical trials for autism and related conditions. The data powering the web application are freely available, as is the code that was used to scrape the data.
We intend to update the tracker monthly, as new data become available. If you have feedback or suggestions, or if you would like to see additional features, please contact us at
[email protected].
You can use the interactive web tool to filter the dataset based on sponsors, enrollment count or a slew of other factors. And the filtered data can be plotted in one or two dimensions, or downloaded directly to a .csv file. We hope this tool facilitates discoveries and helps to bring the evolving landscape of autism drug treatment into sharper focus.
Despite hundreds of clinical trials and dozens of drugs tested for autism, none are approved to treat the condition’s core features. Just two drugs — the antipsychotics risperidone and aripiprazole — have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat autism-related irritability.
The Autism Drug Trial Tracker is not exhaustive. We consulted with clinicians and researchers, some of whom have designed and performed their own clinical trials for autistic people, to choose our data inclusion criteria. We limited our dataset to a subset of trials scraped from the ClinicalTrials.gov results database, which was launched in September 2008 and may not include trials from before that year. We limited our data to include only placebo-controlled trials that are phase 2 and higher, and to exclude trials that are based solely on behavioral interventions. We also excluded drugs tested in combined phase 1 and 2 trials, and we only considered trials involving people diagnosed with autism or a short list of syndromic forms of the condition.
About 65 percent of the trials in the dataset are for autism, 13 percent are for fragile X syndrome, and about 8 percent are for tuberous sclerosis complex. Academic universities and hospitals sponsored more than 60 percent of the trials.
The most commonly tested drug in our dataset is oxytocin, with 19 clinical trials over the past two decades. A large, placebo-controlled trial published in October found that oxytocin was not more effective than placebo at increasing social behaviors in autistic children.
Aripiprazole and risperidone follow oxytocin in total trials tallied, with eight and seven, respectively.
Nearly 10 percent of all trials in the tracker have announced a termination for one reason or another. The most common reasons are a failure to recruit participants, financial difficulties and a lack of efficacy.
For each clinical trial, we curated information that is not available on ClinicalTrials.gov. For instance, we independently determined whether each drug was previously approved by the FDA for a different condition. We identified trials with a ‘combined modality’ that tested multiple drugs at once or mixed a drug intervention with a behavioral therapy. And we also identified peer-reviewed articles for each clinical trial, where available on PubMed, and added descriptions of each drug’s biological mechanism.