How Children's Hospital of Philadelphia will use Jeffrey Lurie’s $50M gift for autism research

Perhaps it’s fitting that Daniel Rader, MD, uses a sports analogy when discussing the goals of the new Lurie Autism Institute.

Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie has donated $50 million to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine to establish the new Lurie Autism Institute.

Jeffrey Lurie, the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, donated $50 million to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine to establish the institute and accelerate studies of autism. The organizations announced the gift in June.

Rader, chief of translational medicine and human genetics at Penn Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, serves as the interim director of Lurie Autism Institute. Rader tells Chief Healthcare Executive® that he’s enthusiastic about the gift’s potential impact and offers a metaphor from the football world.

With the pediatric hospital working with one of the nation’s top academic medical centers, Rader says the goal is “to really try to dive into autism and advance the ball in terms of research, in a way that you know maybe would be different than what's been done so far.”

“An explicit goal of the Lurie family and of us at CHOP and Penn is to make this institute, I don't want to sound too grandiose, an epicenter for autism research, not only in the country, but the world,” Rader says.

Rader says it will require more work and more fundraising to reach that goal. But he says he wants potential donors to think of the Lurie Autism Institute as the place for the “best, most impactful research in autism “

“We want people to think of this institute as a place to really make a difference,” Rader says.

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Aiming to impact patients

Lurie, who has owned the Eagles for more than 30 years, brings a personal sense of mission in establishing the institute. Lurie’s brother, Peter, is on the autism spectrum.

He formed the Eagles Autism Foundation in 2018. His mother, Nancy Lurie Marks, founded the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation to help those with autism in 1977. The foundation established the Lurie Center for Autism at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2009.

At a news conference in June to announce the new institute in Philadelphia, Lurie said, “We’re aiming not just to understand autism more deeply—but to transform what’s possible for individuals and families worldwide.”

One in 31 children in the U.S. are living with autism spectrum disorder.

Rader says the institute’s research will be important, but the goal is to work toward tangible improvements for those with autism.

“We absolutely, as with much of the research at CHOP and Penn, really are translationally minded and would like to see discoveries turned into something that actually impacts patients and makes their lives better,” Rader says.

He points to the potential of gene editing to target mutations in specific genes linked to autism.

Rader says the institute is determined to ensure that the work in the laboratory leads to better treatment and therapies.

“These things are hard and take time, and I certainly don't want to give the idea that this is going to be simple,” he says. “But that is an explicit goal of the institute.”

He points to Lurie’s timing in the donation, saying it may not have had as much bang for the buck a decade ago. But with advances in research, the new institute is now poised to use the growing body of knowledge in autism to develop new approaches to treatment.

“There is a sense of urgency that it is time to take everything we've learned and really try to move the ball forward,” he says.

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‘Autism across the lifespan’

Rader relishes the different areas of research that he expects to see in the coming years.

Dr. Daniel Rader, interim director of the Lurie Autism Institute, says he's looking forward to advancing studies of autism across the lifespan. He also says the institute should spur more scientists to study autism.

Part of that work will involve getting a greater understanding of genetic and environmental links to autism.

“There's undoubtedly environmental factors that interact with genes to produce the risk of autism,” Rader says. “And we have a world-class epigenetics institute at Penn and CHOP that essentially marries environment and genes and the biology of that. So we really want to focus on the environment-gene interactions in autism as another kind of major focus.”

The institute is looking to expand studies of how autism is expressed over the course of a lifetime.

With Penn Medicine’s huge maternity program, Rader says they intend to enroll a lot of mothers in a longitudinal study, as well as infants cared for at the pediatric hospital and adults with autism.

He’s anxious for more research and understanding of “that critical window of the transition from adolescence to early adulthood.”

“We have a whole intention of really focusing on autism across the lifespan,” Rader says.

The institute will be enlisting adults with autism to gain more insights.

“We will learn a lot by studying the lifespan and studying adults with autism as a component of trying to really understand this very complex condition,” he says.

The institute is also going to be looking into the development of speech and why some individuals with autism are nonverbal.

“We would really like to understand, what are the aspects of autism that relate to speech, and why is it that a subset of kids with autism are nonverbal? And not only understand it, but if we can understand it better, really devise ways that, with early intervention, we might be able to help turn at least some of these nonverbal autistic kids into kids who at least are capable of using speech at some level to communicate with with the rest of the world,” Rader says.

Spurring more research

The Lurie Institute is aiming to spur more ideas and studies. The institute plans to hold an annual symposium to bring top researchers together.

The institute is also establishing an award for science in the autism spectrum: the Lurie Autism Institute Prize for ASD Research.

Rader says he hopes that the institute will be able to harness the abilities of many scientists at Penn Medicine and CHOP. He says he sees “a lot of opportunities for synergy.”

“There are dozens of labs at CHOP and Penn that work in autism or autism-adjacent areas, but there's relatively little kind of coordination,” Rader says.

“And I think an institute like this, you know, based on our campus between CHOP and Penn, has the ability to really look top down, and really try to promote synergy and collaboration among labs that already work in autism.”

Rader also wants the institute to encourage more young scientists to work in autism research.

He hopes to engage “the amazing scientists on our campus who don't work in autism but have interests that are adjacent or potentially relevant, who might be able to, as a result of this institute, get drawn into the autism field, and use at least some of their time and skills to focusing on the autism question.”

While he says many fields of medical research could use more young talent, Rader says there should be more people engaged in research of autism spectrum disorder.

“There's a bit of a mismatch between the prevalence of this condition, one in 31 live births, and the number of people who work on it,” Rader says. “So I think in that sense, the public impact of this condition is so huge that, yes, we do need and we should have more really smart, talented people who want to work on an important public health issue. We should have them working on autism.”