Visceral Research Report

Visceral established in 2000, is first and foremost a medical research foundation, initiating and pursuing hypothesis driven medical research. Visceral is not a campaigning organisation, nor are Visceral funded researchers ‘anti-vaccine’ in any sense of the word. Visceral will not knowingly accept research donations from organisations that oppose the use of vaccines.
However safety must be of paramount concern in any medical intervention, such as vaccination.
Today Visceral has the following responsibilities.

Research administration. (contracts and research agreements, disbursement of grants, project management, progress chasing, project reporting and reviews).
Research direction and selection of projects. (review and selection of projects in line with the overall research plan, liaison with and support to salaried researchers, co-ordination with independent collaborators, presentations, lectures, grand rounds, presentations at academic and parents meetings and contributing to the writing of academic articles for most projects)
Fundraising. (grant writing, attendance at events, personal programme of communication with all individual and institutional donors and close collaboration with US charities raising and granting funds towards biomedical research in autism and inflammatory bowel disease.
At the time of writing Visceral staff and funds raised are supporting sixteen projects in eleven institutions in Europe and the US. These projects involve 35 salaried researchers and independent collaborators. Costs of individual projects range from $40,000 to $1,800,000. Visceral is the leading organisation supporting research into the gastro-intestinal disorders that often occur in conjunction with regressive autism.

There are three themes for current research projects.

Mechanisms of disease, continues to focus on the gastro-intestinal tract as a potential seat of the disorder in this subset of children. A particular focus is the aberrant immunological activity seen at the site of the disease which has been initially described in several published articles. A second theme of increasing importance in the coming months is the characterisation of the genetic signalling that underlies the pathological and immunological features that have already been described. These investigations may in turn lead to the identification of possible targets for new therapies.

Causation. Studies of the viral presence in the gastro-intestinal tract and its activity therein, will continue on several sites. However we are also in the process of initiating new studies which, if given the go ahead, will examine possible aspects of causation by studying small populations in considerable detail.

In addition to the Visceral funded and supported projects, we are aware of over 80 other independent researchers investigating other biomedical aspects of autism and possible environmental causes. Regular international meetings enable ideas and results to be exchanged with many of these independent researchers.

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