NIH - first call for research supporting minimally verbal

Post Reply New Topic

In January, Kristina Johnson participated in a two-day workshop on promoting communication in minimally verbal and nonspeaking autistic people, hosted by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), a member of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Just a few months later, on 3 April, the NIDCD posted its first-ever Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) encouraging researchers to submit grant proposals on the topic.

Johnson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rosamund Stone Zander Translational Neuroscience Center at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts, working with Mustafa Sahin and Carol Wilkinson. She had long felt her work was on the outskirts of the NIH’s funding interests, she says, and the posting thrilled her. “I’m so excited to see it. I do think that it will be a catalyst for change.”

The NIH created NOSIs (pronounced “no-see”) in 2019 to encourage researchers to study a particular topic via its existing funding mechanisms. They replace the more general program announcements that offered funds in a scientific area. Until recently, the NIH’s only funding announcement for work with minimally verbal autistic people was a 2010 call for researchers with active grants to extend their projects to include the “characterization and/or treatment” of nonverbal autistic children. The April NOSI is the first to specifically address autism since the category’s inception four years ago.

In January, Kristina Johnson participated in a two-day workshop on promoting communication in minimally verbal and nonspeaking autistic people, hosted by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), a member of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Just a few months later, on 3 April, the NIDCD posted its first-ever Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) encouraging researchers to submit grant proposals on the topic.

Johnson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rosamund Stone Zander Translational Neuroscience Center at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts, working with Mustafa Sahin and Carol Wilkinson. She had long felt her work was on the outskirts of the NIH’s funding interests, she says, and the posting thrilled her. “I’m so excited to see it. I do think that it will be a catalyst for change.”

The NIH created NOSIs (pronounced “no-see”) in 2019 to encourage researchers to study a particular topic via its existing funding mechanisms. They replace the more general program announcements that offered funds in a scientific area. Until recently, the NIH’s only funding announcement for work with minimally verbal autistic people was a 2010 call for researchers with active grants to extend their projects to include the “characterization and/or treatment” of nonverbal autistic children. The April NOSI is the first to specifically address autism since the category’s inception four years ago.

On 10 July the NIDCD took another step by asking the public for input on which avenues of research would best support minimally verbal people. Karen Chenausky, director of the Speech in Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston, says this call, together with the NOSI and the workshop, mark a shift in the agency’s autism priorities.

Chenausky is applying for a New Innovator Award for early-career researchers. Just three such grants have gone to autism projects to date: one for gut-brain neural circuits, one for genetic contributions to autism, and one for modeling autism using pluripotent stem cells. Chenausky’s proposal, on the other hand, involves identifying and supporting children who may not develop spoken language.

Until April’s NOSI focusing on nonverbal autistic people, such work has been a difficult sell, Chenausky says, because it’s “hard to convey” to NIH reviewers that rigorous work is possible with this group.

But now, she adds, she can show her grant reviewers that the NIH is explicitly interested in her work. She wrote the NOSI’s notice number into the first page of her proposal.