Don't count on it. My experience is that funding goes to those who are not serious about autism epidemiology. Back in the mid-1990s, I was at a startup in Silicon Valley with about 100 employees where, during a few year period, 5 of the employees had children diagnosed with autism severe enough that they were barely verbal at best. This struck me as a great opportunity to discover the cause so I contacted a Berkeley epidemiologist who had been funded to do autism research. His comment was simply that "Yes we know that these microclusters exist." and that was that. No follow up.