Over recent years, precision medicine has become a key focus of autism research. The aim is to combine new pathophysiologically based therapies with stratification biomarkers to predict which therapy may be beneficial for a particular autistic person. This approach chiefly relies on new ‘translatable’ methods that help linking findings from animal models to humans, and new methods to make predictions of individuals and to identify subgroups. Here we present several novel, complementary approaches adopted in two international autism consortia – the POND Network and EU-AIMS/ AIMS-2-TRIALS. Both consortia include multi-disciplinary preclinical and large-scale clinical programmes. In this panel, we will be sharing innovative new methods, ideas and data to advance biomarker discoveries and validation, and increase robustness and replication of findings.