Can you give some examples, you or Alicia, about how these brain donations through Autism Brainette have maybe led to some important findings? So

the research has actually been going on for many, many years, and it has taken that many years to build up kind of like a body of evidence that shows what's going on in the brains of people with autism.

So that includes families with rare genetic disorders like Phelan McDermid.

And it also includes individuals who may not have a genetic diagnosis.

So what research is finding is there seems to be, and through replication, one of the first things that was discovered was something called the synapse.

So you have a cell body and then you have a synapse that projects out to other neurons.

On that synapse, there are little growths where neurons can connect to each other.

But I do want to help families understand, let's say in the Duke 15 community, what is an appropriate sample number that like impactful findings actually can come from?

The agency notes that they have reviewed 23 studies since 2009 and found clinical benefit in 85% of patients with a deficiency.

The issue is whether or not that is sufficient evidence for the FDA to approve this for, uh, treatment of autism when there's very little efficacy data.

But Alicia Halliday, chief science officer for the Autism Science Foundation, is mostly worried about this, creating too much false hope.

The indication that the FDA put out was for autism with cerebral folate deficiency.

I don't think that that was understood by the autism community who feels like this is a panacea for all people with autism.

Most people with autism do not have a cerebral folate deficiency.

Why don't we use that term, Asperger's?

Yeah, so Asperger's was a term that prior to 2007 was actually a diagnostic term.

People had autism or Asperger's or something called PDD-NOS and that was used to designate the different levels of functioning, right? So somebody who is living independently and has a job and maybe has awkward and odd social mannerisms would be considered PDD-NOS or Asperger's, and then someone who wasn't living independently or had m- minimal verbal ability, that person would have autism.

The intention of that was was to make sure everybody got the supports that they needed, right? So people with childhood autism and Asperger's maybe needed different things, right? So they needed different levels of speech therapy or they needed d- different levels of support.

But what was happening was that wasn't always the case.

Some per- some clinicians who were very well-trained, very well-meaning, they would diagnose with Asperger's, somebody else would diagnose with PDD-NOS-

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