BRAIN Foundation’s Aurora Research Network: Building a New Standard of Care for Severe Neuropsychiatric Disorders

National Initiative, in Collaboration With Stanford Medicine, Aims to Establish the First Evidence-Based Standard of Care

A Critical Gap in Autism Care

Children and adults with autism can sometimes experience sudden and devastating changes in behaviour and functioning. These episodes may be accompanied by severe anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, aggression, regression, catatonia, or other neuropsychiatric symptoms that dramatically alter daily life. Yet despite the profound impact these deteriorations have on individuals and their families, there remains no widely accepted, evidence-based standard for how they should be evaluated or treated.

The BRAIN Foundation is working to change that.

In collaboration with Stanford Medicine, The BRAIN Foundation has launched the Aurora Research Network (Aurora), a national research initiative designed to establish the first coordinated, evidence-based standard of care for severe neuropsychiatric deteriorations associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), PANS/PANDAS, and related neurodevelopmental and neuroimmune conditions. To accelerate this work, The BRAIN Foundation has committed an initial $2 million to establish the network and its research infrastructure.

Research With the Power to Change Clinical Practice

For The BRAIN Foundation, Aurora reflects its broader mission of supporting research with the greatest potential to improve the lives of people living with autism. While considerable research has advanced our understanding of autism itself, comparatively little attention has been devoted to developing evidence-based approaches for the complex medical comorbidities that frequently accompany the condition.

Families often find themselves navigating multiple medical specialties without clear guidance or consensus. Different clinicians may recommend different investigations and treatments, leaving parents to make difficult decisions in the absence of strong scientific evidence. Aurora aims to close that gap by generating the clinical evidence needed to guide diagnosis and treatment, replacing today’s fragmented approaches with coordinated, evidence-based care that improves patient outcomes.

Building Towards a New Standard of Care

The launch of Aurora represents the next stage in The BRAIN Foundation’s long-term research strategy.

Over the past several years, the Foundation has invested in a portfolio of pioneering basic and translational research aimed at understanding the biological mechanisms underlying autism and its medical comorbidities. Rather than focusing on behaviour alone, these projects have explored some of the most important but historically underfunded areas of autism research, including immune dysfunction, gastrointestinal disease, mitochondrial dysfunction, the gut microbiome, biomarkers and precision medicine.

Among the Foundation’s earlier grants were studies investigating chronic gastrointestinal inflammation in autism, microbiota transfer therapy, gene–microbiome interactions, mitochondrial dysfunction, altered immune responses, environmental influences on metabolism, and the development of biological biomarkers that could improve diagnosis and treatment monitoring. More recent awards have expanded this work into stem-cell models of autism, neuroimaging, blood biomarkers, EEG-based treatment monitoring, minimally verbal autism, and the biological mechanisms underlying acute neuropsychiatric deterioration.

Collectively, these projects have transformed our understanding of the biological processes that contribute to autism and its associated medical conditions. The next challenge is translating those discoveries into evidence-based medicine by developing clinical protocols, validating biomarkers, conducting rigorous multicentre clinical trials, and determining which treatments truly improve patient outcomes. That is precisely the role Aurora has been created to fulfil.

Five Priorities for Better Care

Aurora has been designed to answer the fundamental scientific and clinical questions that have long limited progress in this field. Its first five research priorities will generate the evidence needed for more precise diagnosis, better treatments and improved standards of care.

1. Understand how these illnesses evolve over time.
   By collecting long-term clinical data, researchers will build a clearer picture of symptom onset, disease progression, relapse, recovery and the factors that influence long-term outcomes.
2. Identify meaningful patient subgroups.
   Using clinical and biological data, the network will develop evidence-based methods for distinguishing different forms of illness, allowing treatments to be matched more effectively to individual patients.
3. Develop better ways to measure treatment success.
   Reliable outcome measures are essential for high-quality clinical trials. Aurora will refine and validate tools that accurately assess symptom burden and treatment response.
4. Learn from real-world clinical experience.`
   By analysing how patients respond to existing therapies across participating centres, researchers hope to identify the most promising treatments for future clinical trials.
5. Discover biological markers that can guide care.
   The network will investigate biomarkers in blood and other biological samples that may improve diagnosis, predict treatment response and help clinicians monitor disease activity over time.

Together, these five priorities will create the scientific foundation needed for more personalized, evidence-based care while helping researchers design faster and more informative clinical trials.

Creating a National Research Network

Achieving these research goals requires a national infrastructure that allows clinicians and researchers to work together efficiently. Aurora is built around three key components designed to accelerate collaboration, standardise research and speed clinical discovery.

Building international clinical consensus

One of Aurora’s first priorities is to establish the first evidence-based consensus recommendations for evaluating and treating severe neuropsychiatric deteriorations associated with autism and related conditions.

To achieve this, The BRAIN Foundation is funding an international Delphi consensus panel that will bring together leading experts in autism, psychiatry, neurology, immunology, gastroenterology, paediatrics, emergency medicine and other relevant disciplines. By systematically building consensus across multiple specialties, the panel will provide clinicians with practical, evidence-informed guidance where little currently exists.

Establishing a multicentre clinical trial platform

Aurora will also serve as a national clinical trial platform designed to make collaborative research faster, more efficient and more consistent.

Rather than each institution developing its own research processes independently, the network will provide shared study protocols, coordinated ethics approvals, standardised contracts and harmonised data-sharing systems. This common infrastructure will reduce administrative barriers, encourage participation by additional centres and allow promising therapies to be evaluated more rapidly across multiple institutions.

Keeping patients and families at the centre

The experiences of patients and families will help shape every stage of the research programme.

Through a dedicated patient and family advisory council, Aurora will ensure that research priorities, study design and clinical outcome measures reflect the real-world challenges faced by individuals living with these disorders. By incorporating patient perspectives from the outset, the network aims to produce research that is not only scientifically rigorous but also directly relevant to clinical practice.

A Long-Term Commitment to Better Care

Aurora represents the first phase of a long-term vision. The BRAIN Foundation envisions an integrated national network that brings together clinicians, researchers and healthcare institutions to ensure that every patient, regardless of where they live, has access to coordinated, evidence-based care. More than twenty institutions have already expressed interest in participating, with additional sites expected to join as the network expands.

The Aurora Research Network is the natural evolution of The BRAIN Foundation’s long-term research strategy. After years of investing in the scientific discoveries that are reshaping our understanding of autism and its medical comorbidities, the Foundation is now investing in the collaborative clinical infrastructure needed to turn those discoveries into better care. The goal is simple: to ensure that promising science leads not only to new knowledge, but to measurable improvements in the lives of patients and families.