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news.Makerere University and Johns Hopkins University are to collaborate on the first clinical safety trial of a vaccine to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV through breastfeeding.
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The phase I study will be conducted in Uganda and is designed to test the safety of injecting newborns with the vaccine, formally known as ALVAC-HIV. Researchers estimate that the vaccine could potentially stop up to 8,000 of Uganda’s 22,000 infections a year in children. Initial results are expected by mid-2007.
“A vaccine is the easiest way to help prevent mother-to-child transmission of the disease,” said Laura Guay, an associate professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Vaccines often involve several injections over a short period of time, whereas other drug therapies that might prevent transmission are less convenient and must be taken daily over a longer period of time and potentially have more side effects.”
Discouraging breastfeeding altogether is not a practical option for many women because the lack of safe alternatives. Moreover, it would be potentially harmful to deny this key means of nutrition to newborns who do not contract HIV from their infected mothers.
Breast milk is a leading route of infection in the developing world, according to the World Health Organization, which estimates that each day 1,800 newborns are infected with the AIDS virus..
The goal of the Hopkins team is to find a vaccine that will allow infants to develop immunity to HIV and to one day provide an AIDS vaccine as part of a child’s regular vaccination program.
Previous research using an ALVAC-HIV vaccine in adults in Uganda showed it to be safe, but it is not yet known if it is effective in preventing infection.