How the Swiss pharmaceutical industry supported a crucial research topic: Autism research in the EU-AIMS and AIMS-2-TRIALS projects.
The European Autism Interventions – A Multicentre Study for Developing New Medications(EU-AIMS) – project was the first pan-European project that brought together organisations representing autistic people and their families, academia and industry. By addressing the neurological and developmental condition that is found in approximately 1 in 100 children, the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI)-funded project, which took place between April 2012 and March 2018, tried to understand autism and develop supports for aspects of autism for those who want them. In doing so, the project aimed to identify biomarkers of autism and advance our knowledge of the variability within the biological and behavioural characteristics of autistic individuals.
In light of the important research the project was conducting, Autism Innovative Medicine Studies-2-Trials (AIMS-2-TRIALS) was launched to continue and expand some of the work pioneered in EU-AIMS. The project began in June 2018 and will run until May 2025, further exploring the biomarkers that indicate whether an individual has or may develop particular characteristics, and testing medicines that support autistic individuals in things they may want help with, such as managing their sensory experiences. Both projects have been and are bringing together industry, research, and the autism community, highlighting the importance of collaboration in this field.
Christopher Chatham (Global Head of Innovation at Genentech), leading the world’s largest Swiss-based biotech company Roche in AIMS-2-TRIALS, revealed his experiences as an industry representative in the consortium of the two projects:
EU-AIMS was the largest consortium for autism research ever funded at its time and was subsequently superseded by AIMS-2-TRIALS. Chatham joined Roche in 2016 and subsequently supported Roche’s participation in EU-AIMS and AIMS-2-TRIALS, finding it a “fascinating opportunity […] to engage, not just with new industrial colleagues at Roche, but also to this really big and rich network of academic researchers”. Initially, he was engaged in the hands-on work related to analysing some of the clinical data, but later moved on to lead a work package of EU-AIMS. At AIMS-2-TRIALS, Chatham is Roche’s lead and also makes sure that “interests and priorities […] of industries are represented and have a voice in academic research”. Against the background of a lack of inclusion of the autism community in autism research projects in the past, he highlighted the importance of their crucial inputs in the EU-AIMS and AIMS-2-TRIALS projects; their involvement pursues the dream of co-creation with researchers, industry, and the autism community.
Peter Scheiffele [Professor at the University of Basel’s (UNIBAS) Biozentrum] is the UNIBAS’ lead in the AIMS-2-TRIALS project and accordingly represents Swiss academia in the consortium of 48 academic, charity and industry partners across Europe. In an interview with SwissCore, he talked about the development of the consortium as a whole and the importance of its members:
EU-AIMS and AIMS-2-TRIALS are two consecutive projects funded by IMI, which is a large-scale public-private partnership between the EU and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA. Roche’s investment as a leader of the consortium came at a time when a lot of pharma companies were abandoning the neuroscience space, therefore showing a strong commitment to this challenging task. The consortium brings together academia and industry, giving higher education institutions the possibility to “understand better the industry perspective, what their key factors and their limitations are”, according to Scheiffele. He highlighted that the cross-border consortium exposes participants to “a broad range of information and also a broad range of opinions”, by being mutually beneficial and avoiding less enriching research with only a small subset of people. Scheiffele also pointed out the opportunities presented by building sub-collaborations with individuals of the consortium, that he would have never had the chance of working and discussing with if it were not for the projects.
For the future, he describes the goal of progressing some findings from the AIMS-2-TRIALS project as a new company in Basel. The goal of this is to “basically have a preclinical candidate for an intervention and then to move it into a human”. To this end, SwissCore also reached out to Özgür Genç (NCCR Fellow at UNIBAS Biozentrum), the senior scientist responsible for this process:
Genç joined the project in 2021 as a National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) fellow to support the work on creating therapeutics for certain autism indications using mice models. Recently, he received a grant from Innosuisse to help with the project, and the Propelling Grant from the University of Basel to strengthen its commercialisation path. This provides Genç and his team the resources to sustain and reach certain milestones in the next few years. When asked about the longevity of the project, he further highlighted that “milestones give [the project] the opportunity to search for additional funding resources”.
The goal of the new company is to develop a therapeutic approach for autistic people that want access to treatments. “By targeting the social communication aspect of autism with a precision medicine approach, it will be possible to help individuals with autism to have better communication skills”, if they want this. To develop the medication, Genç’s team uses animal models to study a chemical molecule that targets selective RNA translational processes and is developing a small molecule compound that can be administrated as a bedside pill. In the long-run, after completing clinical trials, the goal is to distribute the drug to a targeted population to address any difficulties autistic people may believe they have with social communication. The company will be incorporated in Basel-Stadt, thus enticing collaboration in the canton’s strong pharmaceutical industry. Genç also highlighted that the progress so far has been very positive, especially due to the “good resources and environment that supported [the project]”.
The EU-AIMS and AIMS-2-TRIALS projects and the subsequent set up of a new company, reflect the importance of autism research and collaboration in the field. It is just one example of the possible outcomes of the project, with researchers across the project working on taking forward their findings of the project into future work.
Switzerland has played an important role in advancing autism research at a time when most large pharmaceutical companies were not willing to do so, and the cooperation in the large consortia has brought benefits to all the participants of the project. With the AIMS-2-TRIALS project ending in May 2025 and a succeeding project not in sight, the new company could prove to be an essential step towards developing insights of the projects further and turning these into a drug.
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Language matters, which is why we have added this addendum for our language choice in this article. We acknowledge that there are different language preferences in the community and that there is no one way of describing autism on which everyone can agree, which is why the use of “autistic individuals” is not the unanimous preference of the entire community, but simply the one we chose for this article.