The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, the federal government's biomedical moonshot agency, has opened a new research program aimed at rethinking how autism is diagnosed and treated across a person's entire life, rather than relying largely on childhood behavioral screening.
The program, called SPECTRA (Systems for Phenotypic Evaluation, Clinical Trajectories, Response, and Agency), is led by program manager Russell Shilling, an experimental psychologist and Navy veteran who previously developed virtual-reality PTSD therapy at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and has two sons on the autism spectrum. The agency formally opened the solicitation on Sept. 17, with the first solution summaries due Oct. 18.
SPECTRA is built around four technical areas: identifying genetic, environmental, immune, metabolic and developmental factors that shape distinct autism trajectories; building privacy-preserving artificial intelligence models that can classify those trajectories from real-world data; developing and testing more individualized interventions; and creating better tools for communication and everyday function measurement. The program's premise, according to ARPA-H, is that nonlinear interactions among many biological and environmental factors, not a single behavioral checklist, produce the wide range of outcomes seen across the autism spectrum.
A shift from diagnosis to lifelong care
Federal data cited by the agency show roughly one in 31 U.S. 8-year-olds is now identified with autism spectrum disorder, and officials argue that clinical practice has not kept pace with a decade of improved recognition.
"Autism is not one-size-fits-all, and our science and care cannot be either."
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Shilling has said that while autism identification has become more precise, "our approaches to assessment and care have not kept pace." SPECTRA is meant to fund tools that follow individuals from early childhood into adulthood, rather than treating diagnosis as a single point-in-time event, and to identify which factors in a person's trajectory might be modifiable through intervention, according to STAT News.
The initiative follows a separate autism-diagnosis research fund that Kennedy announced earlier in September, part of a broader push by HHS this year to expand autism-related research funding. ARPA-H, created in 2022 and modeled on the Pentagon's DARPA, funds high-risk, high-reward biomedical projects that agency officials say would be unlikely to attract investment through conventional grant channels.
The agency has not yet disclosed how much funding SPECTRA will ultimately distribute; that figure is expected to become clearer once ARPA-H selects proposals following the initial October and December submission deadlines. Full proposal timelines have not yet been announced.
