The Brief

Homelessness among families with children has been growing.

In California, more than 74,000 children under age 4 experienced homelessness between 2022 and 2023, up from the year before, according to a report by SchoolHouse Connection. The study found a similar dynamic across the United States.

Resources for unhoused families have become increasingly scarce, too, amid rising economic stress. Last year, the vast majority of families in California with young children struggled to meet a basic need such as housing or utilities, according to a survey by the Stanford Center on Early Childhood — one of the highest levels in years.

We spoke to five families with young children in Southern California who spoke of how they ended up struggling to stay housed, whether because of a job loss that depleted hard-earned savings, an eviction after a spike in rent, or escape from a home of domestic abuse.

They shared varied experiences of navigating housing stability in L.A., but all expressed a similar sentiment — the emotional weight of protecting their children and the visceral longing to preserve their kids’ childhoods.

(LAist is using first names only because of concerns around safety and potential ramifications.)

“I may not be rich, but I feel like seeing my daughter paint and draw, that makes me rich,” Erika says.

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Erika left a bad situation to prevent a worse one

'It's a struggle to be a mom in Los Angeles at this day and age, period.'

The repurposed motel room where Erika stays with her two children is bare in furnishings, but she’s laid down shaggy rugs and decorated the bunk beds with bright comforters. Her 8-year-old daughter’s bunk is covered in Hello Kitty decor.

“Here, in this room, it doesn't feel like I’m homeless,” she said.

It’s not Erika's first time in this shelter near Koreatown. The first was with her children’s father about two years ago after they were evicted. Their one-bedroom apartment in Crenshaw went from $1,200 to $1,800.

They had a baby boy while at the shelter, and moved out to Section 8 housing. But about a year ago, Erika took her children and left, breaking a cycle of domestic strife at the cost of becoming homeless again.

“I’m not going to have DCFS (the Department of Child and Family Services) come and take my kids from both of us because we’re fighting and we’re toxic,” she said. “I don't know where I would be right now if I didn't have this place. I would probably be in the street with my kids, or I probably wouldn't even have custody of my kids.”

Erika isn’t new to the foster care system. She herself entered foster care when she was 12 years old because of her mother’s drug addiction.

“I just knew that I didn't want to give the lifestyle that I was given to my children,” she said.

She shares custody of her children, and pines for the days when she’s with them. She’ll buy coloring supplies for her daughter from Ross across the street. Her 2-year-old son is busy climbing the beds and running around.

“I may not be rich, but I feel like seeing my daughter paint and draw, that makes me rich,” she said. “Even little things like reading my kid a book at night. As funny as this sounds, like no one read me a book.”

She said she’s working on going to school and getting her real estate license. She hopes to secure low-income housing. Research shows economic hardship — tied to the high cost of housing — is a primary driver of homelessness.

“Los Angeles is not a fairy tale, you know?” she said. “I know it's temporary. I know one day I'll get my house. I know one day, I'm gonna be cooking with my daughter watching ‘Cocomelon.’ One day, but I know I’m trying. I’m trying.”

After leaving a domestic violence situation, Jessica found housing help through several nonprofits and is now renting a house on her own.

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Jessica juggles three part-time jobs

'I have done everything possible … sometimes it’s just not enough.'

When Jessica fled her abusive husband, pregnant and with her two young boys, she told them they were on an adventure. They sought shelter in hotels.

“I would try to make it as fun as I could,” Jessica says. “I kept them entertained — a lot of jumping on the bed, a lot of just having fun or playing with their toys or being outside, like parks — just try to only be there when it was time to eat, shower and go to bed.”

But it wasn’t ideal for parenting. She couldn’t store groceries, the weekly rates were expensive, and transient visitors made it a less-than-ideal environment for her two kids.

“[It was] a never-ending rollercoaster,” she recalled.

After about six months, she got in touch with House of Ruth, a nonprofit that supports survivors of domestic violence, that helped her find housing and help with a portion of her rent. Domestic violence is one of the leading causes of homelessness among women.

But that help was time-limited, and she faced eviction after falling a month and a half behind on her payments.

“I was literally losing it. I didn't know if we were gonna be in the middle of the streets. I don't have family. I don't. It's just me and my kids,” she said, echoing a sentiment LAist heard from other families.

She was able to get rental help from a homeless prevention program through another nonprofit — a program designed to help families stay in their homes. That’s since ended, and now, she rents a house from a church in an L.A. suburb at a discount.

When LAist visited in January, Jessica had just moved into the two-bedroom. Her three young children — 7 and under — share the master bedroom. Her favorite part of her new house is a kitchen bar counter.

“The kids are really enjoying just sitting there and watching me cook and it feels like a hibachi restaurant,” she said.

When her kids are in school, she juggles three part-time jobs — at the church nearby, cleaning houses, and as a substitute teacher. She’s also in school full-time working toward a degree in healthcare administration. She wakes up at 2:30 in the morning and works on her schoolwork until her kids wake up around 6.

“They'll never see a time where like I'm crying or something like that. They always see me joking around with them, laughing with them, doing something with them,” she said.

“The most important thing is keeping a roof over my kids’ heads,” she added. “When you see families, um, mothers and fathers with children and they're on the street or they're in shelters, it's not by the lack of effort, it's by the lack of resources and rent.”

Caseworkers have helped Marie get connected to temporary shelter. Soon, she says, she will be moving into permanent housing and wants to get into this line of work to help others.

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Marie got clean for her daughter

'If I could have anything portrayed from any of this situation with me and my family, it would be that we love each other.'

Marie glanced at her phone, which has a timer of the days, hours, minutes she’s been sober.

“ I've been clean for 11 months, 12 days, 11 hours and 20 minutes,” she said.

Marie held her 4-month-old daughter, who blinked contentedly in the beam of the afternoon sun.

Last July, Marie was living in a “tiny home” in North Hollywood with her partner when she found out she was pregnant. She stopped using meth immediately.

“I was a drug addict for 25 years and stopped completely because of my daughter,” she said.

Marie became homeless about three years ago after being in and out of jail. She’d been arrested for identity fraud and larceny. With no family nearby, she began living in her truck. “It was not easy. Living homeless is not for the weak at all,” she said. Marie also lives with bipolar disorder.

She and her partner were able to move into a tiny home, which she said, at the time, was “awesome” — until she was pregnant.

“I was like, OK, listen, I’m about to pass out. There’s not enough ventilation there.” At seven months pregnant, she moved into a family shelter in the San Fernando Valley, a 100-unit former motel. “Moving here was a luxury and a breath of fresh air.” Her water broke in their room about a month before her due date. Her baby spent 10 days in the neonatal intensive care unit. “She’s been doing great ever since.”

Pregnancy while homeless is common. A study from UC San Francisco in 2023 found that 1 in four unhoused women between 18 and 44 years old in California was pregnant. They’re also less likely to access prenatal resources.

Marie soaked in her daughter’s recent developments. Just days ago, the newborn haze cleared from her eyes and she looked up at her mom. “ And then she got this big old grin on her face. And it, I swear to God, it was the single most rewarding feeling in my life because she looked at me like she was falling in love with me for the first time,” she said.

In a few weeks, Marie said, they’ll be moving out of the shelter to a two-bedroom apartment in Van Nuys, where she’ll have permanent supportive housing, a program that helps pay for housing people living with mental illness. There, she’ll pay 30% of the rent. She said she plans to drive Uber part-time, so she can take her daughter around. She said she also wants to work in the field of homeless services after her experience and because of the people who helped her.

As for what she’s looking forward to in her new home for her baby? “Everything ... I’m excited to watch her grow.”

After losing his job, Wayne and his family lost their apartment in L.A. and had to sleep in and out of their car.

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Wayne moved his family away to find a home

'We're willing to give California up for that because the most important thing is to be housed and fed.'

When Wayne lost his job two years ago in A/V tech support, he had $30,000 saved up — enough to stay afloat for at least a little while. But months went by, and the job market was brutal. Soon, they ran out of money and lost their one-bedroom apartment in L.A.

He and his partner stayed in and out of motels and in their car with their 4-year-old son at the time. “The first time we slept in the car it was really, really hot, and [the son] ended up with heat rashes all over his back,” he said.

Thousands of Angelenos use cars as shelter. Although it’s difficult to get an exact number, a recent Homeless Count found that more than 23,000 people live in a vehicle on any given night.

His son, A., has autism and struggles to sleep. “He hates it,” Wayne said, who wanted to use the first initial of his son's name. “The only way he'll sleep in the car is if he's literally on, usually my lap.” LAist interviewed Wayne last fall and chronicled his story.

But during the days, he would take A. to the park or the library, playing with him and his car toys.

“The most important thing is trying to make sure he basically is comfortable as much as possible, that he's [having] fun, that he's not really understanding what's going on — which I think we're doing a good job [at] so far,” Wayne said.

After months of searching, Wayne got a job out of state late last year — and left California, where he was born and raised. They moved into a home in the dead of winter. His son ran into every room, exploring.

“He was kind of standing there for a bit, just kind of blank stare, and then I told him, ‘It's our home,’ and he smiled,” Wayne said. He said after months of living in their car, his son was still getting used to having a home.

“We left to go to the store earlier today, and he didn't wanna leave. He said ‘bye-bye’ to the house and started crying. He didn't wanna leave,” Wayne said. “He just wants to be inside. I think he just wants to take in — the stability of being inside."

Diana came to the U.S. two years ago with her three children for economic opportunity. “We went hungry a lot—way too much,” she said.

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Diana hopes her children don’t grow to resent her

'We came here to better ourselves, to do good things here, what we couldn’t do back home.'

Diana and her three children came to the U.S. from Venezuela two years ago, settling in L.A.. The economic collapse there has led to nearly 7.9 million Venezuelans leaving the country, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency.

She said her family went hungry far too often. “ Es duro como mamá que los hijos le piden comida a uno y porque es horrible cuando un hijo le pide comida a uno y uno no tenga," she said through tears, hurt that she couldn't give her children food when they asked for it.

Desperate, she left with her kids, two of them teenagers — traveling through the notorious Darién Gap, a 70-mile stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama where hundreds of thousands of migrants have crossed in recent years — and where the number of deaths is largely known to be undercounted.

Children under 5 have been the fastest-growing group of migrants crossing the treacherous terrain. Diana and her children traveled for months.

"Pasado mucha necesidad de, este, la cual el, en la selva, la selva del Darién," she said, talking about the hardships faced crossing the Darién jungle. She said there were many rapes, deaths and murders.

When they got to Mexico, they lived on the streets.

" Andando en la calle, durmiendo en la calle, pidiendo limosna," she said. You go hungry, you live on the street, you just keep going.

After staying in motels in L.A., Diana found a temporary family shelter where her family shares one room, including with their 1-year-old dog Dulce.

She and her husband make minimum wage, cleaning at a factory that makes burritos, and are trying to figure out how to afford rent on their own. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, living on $16 an hour for a family of five when the median rent in the Los Angeles Metro area is over $2,000.

She says she's grateful they're in a better spot, not out on the street — but as a mother, she wants to give her children the best.

"Yo me imagínese que mi hijo me diga: 'Mamá, ¿y entonces para qué me sacaste de allá? ¿A tenernos aquí, porque en estas cuatro paredes?'" — "I can just imagine my son telling me, 'Mom, why did you take me out of there? Just to have us here, inside these four walls?'"

But she said here, her kids aren’t starving. They have food and are going to school. Her oldest is enrolled in a summer program that has field trips across the city.

Still, recent news about immigration and mass deportations has her on edge.

"No hay comida en mi país no hay y no me gustaría volver," she said. There's no food left in her home country. And that's what causes her anguish and anxiety: Getting caught by immigration, she and her family getting deported. "A veces me pone, me llena de angustia, de ansiedad, de eso, de saber de eso que me lleno."

She said she prays for protection over her and her children.

"Es en los manos de Dios," she said.

It’s in God’s hands.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

A week after 45-year-old Raz Chowdhury was moved off the streets into interim housing through an Inside Safe operation, he was found dead in his hotel room.

Chowdhury had spent years living on the streets of Koreatown, moving between encampments along Sixth Street and Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place.

Sherin Varghese first met him three or four years ago. Chowdhury would reach out to Varghese, a volunteer with Ktown for All, an advocacy group that provides direct aid for people experiencing homelessness in Koreatown. He would ask her for tents, tarps, clothes and other supplies. More often than not, she said, they weren’t for him.

“He would always go above and beyond to take care of the people around him,” Varghese said at a vigil for Chowdhury on Saturday, Aug. 29.

Once, after Chowdhury lost his phone during a sanitation sweep, he searched for Varghese online and found her work number. He called to ask if she could bring tents and tarps for him and other people whose belongings were lost in the sweep.

“He was resourceful, he was reliable, and he was so thoughtful about the way that he talked about how all of this affected him and affected his friends,” Varghese said.

On June 25, Chowdhury was among 31 people moved into housing during an Inside Safe operation at Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place, according to Mayor Karen Bass’ office.

A week later he was dead.

What happened after Inside Safe

According to Ktown for All, Chowdhury died at the Mayfair Hotel in Westlake, which is used for interim housing.

A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner said the case is still under investigation and Chowdhury died at a hotel in the 1200 block of West 7th Street on July 2. His cause of death is listed as deferred and the case is under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which oversees the Mayfair, would not say if Chowdhury was a resident when he died. An agency spokesperson said they cannot confirm an individual’s enrollment in a LAHSA-contracted program without a written release from next of kin.

LAHSA’s latest Inside Safe report shows that 6,406 people had entered interim housing through the program as of July 31. About 1,750 people remained in interim housing, including 289 at the Mayfair. Meanwhile, 1,802 people, or more than one in four who entered the program, had returned to homelessness. Another 126 people, or about 2%, were listed as deceased.

Bass’ office said it does not disclose the locations where an individual is placed following an Inside Safe operation.

Once someone is connected to interim housing, ongoing services and case management are handled by a LAHSA-contracted service provider, mayor spokesperson Jieun Kim said.

Remembering Chowdhury

The people who knew Chowdhury gathered last week to remember him at the site of the encampment where he had lived at Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place.

A little more than two dozen people attended the memorial, where they placed flowers at the base of a small tribute to him.

Planters now line the sidewalk where the tents once were. Several people cried as they shared memories of Chowdhury, who they said spent years looking out for others living on the streets of Koreatown.

Cynthia Zhang, who has volunteered with Ktown for All for about four to five years, remembers visiting an encampment where Chowdhury was staying after the Los Angeles fires. Newly displaced people there told her they felt safer with that community than they did at shelters.

“I think Raz was really instrumental in helping create that kind of space,” Zhang said at the vigil.

The last time Zhang saw Chowdhury, he had moved again and did not have a lot of his stuff. But he had a new puppy named T-Rex and seemed to be in good spirits.

“He had a really lovely smile,” Zhang said. “I just remember him skateboarding around … all these little things, maybe because I didn’t see him every day, it really does feel like I’ll be walking around and I’ll see him in one of our old spots.”

David Strugar, another longtime Ktown for All volunteer, said Chowdhury was often the person volunteers went to when they wanted to know how people in the area were doing.

“I would always point him out and say, ‘That’s the mayor of this area,’ because wherever he was, he was just the center of it, and he took care of people,” Strugar said.

Chowdhury would tell volunteers who needed what and help distribute supplies, Strugar said.

A few weeks before he died, Varghese said, she and Chowdhury were looking for places where he could stay outside a 41.18 zone, where the city restricts sitting, lying, sleeping and storing personal property in certain public rights-of-way under specified circumstances.

Then Inside Safe moved him indoors.

“I hoped that he’d be one of its success stories, but a week later, he was gone,” Varghese said. “The program is called Inside Safe, but for Raz and 125 others, it wasn’t that. And it was never going to be Inside Safe, and it was never going to be easy to be inside alone for someone who had so much to give and always surrounded himself with people to take care of.”

The last time Strugar saw Chowdhury, he had his dog T-Rex with him. Ktown for All volunteers don’t know where T-Rex is now.

Chowdhury believed he had the right to community and companionship, Strugar said.

“And there are so many people who have so much and won’t give anything,” Strugar said. “And Raz kept having everything taken away from him, and he still ended up being the person to give.”

He added, “I just keep expecting to walk around the corner and see him, and I’m angry that I won’t.”

Got a taste for ducks cooked the Chinese way? Your quest may take you to a quiet suburban backyard in South Pasadena.

That's where That Peking Duck Guy cooks and sells his birds. His clients, he said, include Phil Rosenthal and Roy Choi.

The guy behind That Peking Duck Guy is Hong Pham, who started the social media account in late 2025 as a way to document his latest culinary obsession: making the perfect duck, be it Peking or Pipa (deboned and flattened into the shape of the namesake Chinese string instrument).

The intention was not to sell. "I have a day job," Pham said. A radiologist, to be precise.

"I was actually making so many that neighbors wanted to claim it and offered to buy it," he added. "So I'm like, 'OK, that makes it easier 'cause I don't have to eat it all.'"

Soon came DMs from strangers asking for the same thing.

These days, That Peking Duck Guy caters events and holds takeout pop-ups where people can purchase and pick up a duck (which comes with sides and duck soup) from his South Pasadena backyard — right where he cooks them.

Peking duck from That Peking Duck Guy served with Chinese sweet sauce, chopped spring onions and cucumber slices.

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Duck is the latest obsession

Duck is not his first rodeo. Pham said he and his wife are foodies who've always been curious about delving into Vietnamese and other Asian culinary traditions. For Pham, that also means replicating some of these dishes at home, from scratch.

He'd gone on a tofu bender — making gallons of the stuff, as blocks, drinks and pudding — and also a bánh cuốn spree, or Vietnamese steamed rice rolls. He landed on duck as his latest subject only because he had wanted to make better heo quay, or Vietnamese roasted pork belly.

It's the oven

Pham and one of his special outdoor ovens he uses to roast duck.

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He researched how to get that extra crisp online and landed on an oven people in Asia use to make roast and Peking ducks.

"It was called the Apollo oven 'cause it looks like an Apollo space capsule," he said.

He bought one and then another. In between, he experimented cooking different meats with the new oven to get a feel before turning to the waterfowl.

He even got advice from Top Chef winner Mei Lin, whom he messaged cold: "She's like, 'Keep it simple. Keep it basic. Keep it traditional.'"

Three Pipa ducks inside the oven.

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Hundreds of ducks later, Pham said he still learns something new. That's one reason why his side hustle has stuck around.

"I didn't create like, you know, That Bánh Cuốn Man," he said. "Yeah, duck's gonna last."

Two Pipa ducks fresh out of the oven.

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Southern Californians who’ve long shopped at Daiso, Miniso, Uniqlo or 99 Ranch Market may not be surprised to see the Asian-rooted chains expand across the country.

But that growth is now showing up in the numbers.

The National Retail Federation’s Hot 25 Retailers list ranks retailers by U.S. sales growth from 2024 to 2025. Miniso tops the list, with sales up nearly 53%.

The Chinese chain of gift shops opened its first U.S. store in Pasadena’s Old Town more than nine years ago and is now aiming to grow its American footprint to nearly 500 stores this year.

“If you can make it in Southern California, that's great,” said David Marcotte, senior vice president of global retail and technology at Kantar and an author of the NRF list.

A 99 Ranch market opened in 2023 in Eastvale.

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Marcotte says succeeding in California’s highly competitive retail market can teach chains lessons that translate elsewhere.

“The stone-cold reason is quality. The second one is experience,” he said. “Those are the two things that when shoppers go into any retailer, they’re looking for.”

Daiso ranks third, with growth of nearly 26%, while another Japanese company, Fast Retailing — the parent company of Uniqlo — comes in sixth.

99 Ranch Market, an American supermarket chain founded in Orange County that specializes in Asian groceries, comes in 15th.

Marcotte says Southern California has been a logical landing spot for these companies because of its proximity to Asia. But Marcotte says it can also be an unforgiving place to launch because of the competition, and he often encourages the clients he advises to consider smaller markets.

“I said if you open in Southern California, open one store, get it right,” Marcotte said. “If you get it wrong, you're dead. You'll never recover. You'll have to leave the country and come back in.”

The supermarket industry is particularly tough to break into because customers here, he says, have plenty of alternatives if the quality, selection or experience falls short.

He also emphasizes a retailer in California focused on Asian goods will see more success serving Chinese, Filipino and other Asian customers rather than designing around a particular ethnic group.

“That type of diversity of Asian customers that you have to address in the same store is what really proves to be the difference for an Asian retailer in the California market,” Marcotte said.

That’s part of the business model for 99 Ranch, which was founded by a Taiwanese immigrant who opened the first location in Westminster's Little Saigon in 1984.

Scientists have now gotten closer to understanding how gene mutations may lead some people to develop profound autism.

The clues, they say, lie in the murky space between genes and disease — where key proteins come together and interact.

A team of researchers from UC San Francisco mapped more than a thousand interactions between many proteins that come from certain autism risk genes. This molecular atlas, published in the journal Science, could point researchers toward new and promising treatments.

"It's an unprecedented resource for the field," says Dr. Daniel Geschwind, a professor of human genetics, neurology, and psychiatry at UCLA who was not involved with the study. "A lot of people interested in understanding autism and drug development are going to be using this."

For families affected by profound autism, it offers hope for eventual drug therapies. "This is the kind of scientific advance we have been waiting for and praying for," says Alison Singer, president of the nonprofit Autism Science Foundation, who has a daughter with severe cognitive impairment. "There's still a lot of work ahead, [but] this paper makes the path from genetic discovery to treatment much clearer."

The work builds on progress made in recent years to identify single genes that harbor mutations found in a subset of individuals with profound autism.

Getting past the "wall"

People with profound autism often live with severe intellectual disability and require around-the-clock care. They're nonverbal or minimally verbal, and often have serious medical conditions like epilepsy.

Pinning down the biology behind profound autism has always been a complicated endeavor — while both genes and environmental factors play a role, those factors can vary widely from person to person.

In the past decade or so, some genetics researchers have had remarkable success in identifying high-impact genetic differences in a subset of people with profound autism.

"They've discovered several hundred genes and corresponding mutations that are prevalent in [these] individuals," says Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at UC San Francisco.

"But they kind of hit a wall," he added — because scientists haven't been able to turn those gene discoveries into many promising drugs and treatments.

"There was this huge missing piece," says Dr. Matthew State, a clinical psychiatrist and geneticist at UCSF: The genes serve as blueprints for making proteins that drive brain development, but researchers lacked visibility into how those proteins do the work.

State has been a pioneer in identifying high-risk genes, and the mutations in those genes, that are associated with profound autism. Krogan has been at the forefront of using new technology to look into protein interactions.

More than a decade ago, the two researchers were introduced by their mutual boss, the chancellor at UCSF, who encouraged them to collaborate. "[State] had the genes and the mutations. I had the technologies to look at the corresponding proteins," Krogan says.

They focused on filling a knowledge gap. "What we've been missing is the mechanistic understanding of how these mutations [on the genes] are seemingly resulting in autism," Krogan says. "In order to understand that, you need to go to the proteins."

Proteins are the complex molecules that come together to build the body, based on instructions encoded in the genes. "What makes an eye cell an eye cell, and a muscle a muscle, are the proteins and how they work together," State says. "They are the machinery of life."

In this case, the researchers wanted to find the molecular machinery of profound autism — to understand which proteins came from those high-risk autism genes, and how those proteins worked together.

The research was slow at first, but more recent advances in technology — including artificial intelligence — have sped things up.

To start, the researchers went on a "fishing expedition" for protein interactions. They chose 100 proteins from these high-risk autism genes, injected them into lab-grown cells, and then pulled them out, along with the additional proteins that attached to them.

Then, they used an AI system called AlphaFold, developed by Google DeepMind, to help determine which proteins in the clumps were directly touching. "Where AI is playing an important role is being predictive about who's talking to who," says Krogan. "Sometimes they take years to figure out. Now, we can get these insights in an hour." While imperfect, the system has worked well enough to save significant time and money, Krogan says.

Then, they wanted to see what happened to the proteins when the genes got tweaked. They introduced mutations that appear in patients with profound autism, and assessed what changed. "We broke the proteins in the way that they're broken in autism," says State. "That allows us ultimately to answer the question of, when they're going wrong in autism, how are they going wrong?"

They conducted this research in frogs and in organoids, which are lab-grown tissues that model the human brain. In one example, the mutations weakened the connection between two proteins related to which genes turn on and off in a cell. Then, one went rogue, turning on other genes that led to neurodevelopmental defects in organoids.

Molecular convergence

There are hundreds of rare, high-risk autism genes, acting in more than a thousand different ways.

But in mapping more than 1,800 protein interactions, the researchers found that many of them moved along shared biological pathways — particularly those related to early brain development, such as how synapses get constructed, and which neurons develop and when.

The convergence found in this study aligns with other recent publications, adding to an emerging understanding in the field, says Dr. Geschwind of UCLA.

"If we look at multiple mutations and they converge on the same process, that's strong evidence that you're dealing with the things that you want to treat," State says.

Identifying this more limited set of protein complexes that likely contribute to the development of profound autism could change the approach to treatments, says Singer with the Autism Science Foundation. "We've been working gene-by-gene to correct mutations," she says.

And if future drugs could target these shared protein pathways, she adds, "we may not need that separate therapeutic strategy for every autism gene."

Setting sights on new drug-development targets

It takes years to go from a biological discovery like this to an approved drug that treats humans. The findings would need to be translated into drug candidates, then tested for safety and effectiveness.

"It takes time and a lot of persistence and focus," State says. "This [paper] is unlikely to lead to therapies tomorrow — but it lays an important foundation for them."

Most human drugs are made to target proteins, Geschwind at UCLA says, so the newly published map of protein interactions offers an accessible entry point for pharmaceutical development.

And researchers hope to combine recent technological advances in ways that accelerate that progress even more. "When you put together the ability to borrow from successes in other fields [such as cancer treatments], and the development of AI, we're at an inflection point that will hopefully shorten the time cycle," State says.

Last week, Krogan's Quantitative Biosciences Institute received a $46 million grant from the Aligning Research to Impact Autism initiative, funded by philanthropist and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The researchers are already working on next steps.

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