Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts

Oct. 23, 2008 -- The Mass General Hospital for Children and LADDERS, which is our developmental clinic, is involved in a variety of projects that are research based. We're a very large clinical program so we have involvement with the program in Boston called The Boston Autism Consortium, which is a group of hospitals in the Boston area that are gathering data regarding the medical care and the genetics of children with autism. And we're one of the major contributors of children and patients to that organization.

We're also part of a large consortium called The Autism Treatment Network which is a program that is again providing clinical care to children at now 15 centers throughout the country. And as we provide that care to those children we're gathering information about those children and what their characteristics are so we can better characterize how to offer medical care to those children.

This is a multidisciplinary research program where we're involving neurologist, and genetics specialist, metabolic specialist, gastrointestinal doctors as well as the developmental pediatricians to gathering this data so we're looking at the really the whole child as we're trying to evaluate what's going on with that child.