Over the last 7 years, our next guest’s research center has translated scientific discoveries into meaningful outcomes for individuals and families affected by neurological disorders such as autism, ADHD, Down syndrome, and more and, at the same time, creating 450 jobs in the local community. Mike Switzer interviews Dr. Jane Roberts, Carolina Distinguished Professor and executive director of the Carolina Autism and Neurodevelopment Research Center at the University of SC in Columbia, SC.
TRANSCRIPT:
Switzer: Hello and welcome to another edition of the South Carolina Business Review. This is Mike Switzer. Over the last seven years, our next guests research center has translated scientific discoveries into meaningful outcomes for individuals and families affected by neurological disorders such as autism, adhd, down syndrome and more. And at the same time creating 450 jobs in the local community. Dr. Jane Roberts is the Carolina Distinguished professor and Executive Director of the Carolina Autism and Neurodevelopment Research Center. She joins us by phone now from her office at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Jane, welcome to the program.
Roberts: Thank you for having me.
Switzer: Now tell us more about your center, the research center there, and how you got into doing this work.
Roberts: Absolutely. The Carolina Autism and Neurodevelopment Research center, which we call CAN, was started in 2019 actually as part of a USC initiative. The Provost had a call for action for individuals to propose transformative visionary projects. And my colleague Jeff Twiss and I put together a proposal to establish USC as one of the international experts in, research in autism and neurodevelopmental disorders. There's four different pillars that it encompasses. One primarily is research number two training. So we train undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs as well in different areas. We have a clinical focus where we're looking to establish a clinic to help with diagnostics and treatment for the community members. And then finally, the last pillar is community engagement. We want to make sure that we're being responsive and supporting the community we serve.
Switzer: Now in my intro I talked about scientific discoveries that you have been able to translate into meaningful outcomes for families. Can you share an example or two?
Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. One of the, primary studies that I'm actually leading right now is looking at, the early development and aging of genetic condition called the FMR1 premutation. It's rather common. It affects about 1 in 150 women. So that means there's about a million individuals across the country that have the pre mutation. Some of our work has actually been the first ever published to show that there are some challenges and impairments in a subgroup of infants who have this condition. Previous to our research, it was believed that the large majority, if not all of the infants and young children, weren't affected. And so this discovery has a lot of meaning for these individuals because it suggests that we need to be more vigilant about surveilling their development and we need to be ready to provide intervention because intervention provided earlier has a much greater impact.
Switzer: And now talk about the jobs that are being created here in our area.
Roberts: Yeah, yeah. So many different opportunities to both train people who either leave USC with a, bachelor's degree and serve the community, or they go on and get a graduate degree or maybe a professional degree in, like, either go to dental school or med school or some kind of a health care provider role, but also really directly through our research individuals, faculty at, the center, the CAN center, have generated $120 million in extramural funding to fund our research. And through that research, we hire coordinators, we hire data collectors, we work with statisticians. So we hire a whole host of teams to actually conduct that work.
Switzer: And now everybody's talking about AI and these days, the bad threats possible from AI. But healthcare research, medical research is one of the promising areas of AI. Have you been working with AI at all in trying to better understand these particular issues?
Roberts: Yeah, we have been, looking at leveraging AI as one of the many tools. So from a research perspective, there are some tools where, AI can really detect patterns in large data sets that we wouldn't be able to do with more traditional methods. And that really helps us see sometimes some of the more subtle effects that are actually really important for us to know about. From a treatment perspective, AI can also be very helpful in modifying and individualizing treatment. For example, there might be a young child who has anxiety, and the standard treatments might be appropriate for him or her. But using AI, we can actually feed information into models that will help us know how to adjust not only maybe for that day, but maybe for that individual this year that's different from next year. So there are a lot of practical ways in which AI can help us from both a, discovery and from a treatment perspective.
Switzer: Well, Jane, thank you so much for what you are doing and for your time today.
Roberts: Absolutely. Thank you for having us.
Switzer: Dr. Jane Roberts is the Carolina Distinguished professor and Executive Director of the Carolina Autism and Neurodevelopment Research center at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. We will have a link to the CANN center posted at our webpage so you can learn more south Carolina public radio.org or you can hear this show again and you can find us wherever you find podcasts with the South Carolina Business Review. This is Mike Switzer.
The views expressed on the South Carolina Business Review do not necessarily reflect those of South Carolina Public Radio.
South Carolina Business Review transcripts are intended to accurately represent the original audio version of the program; however, some discrepancies or inaccuracies may exist. The audio format serves as the official record of South Carolina Business Review’s programming.
