Researchers Link Specific Antibody Presence To Prevention Of Mother-To-Baby HIV Transmission

Exploring why some HIV-positive mothers transmit the virus in utero to their babies while others don't, researchers from the UCLA AIDS Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory studied 38 infant-mother pairs in the UCLA arm of the Los Angeles Pediatric AIDS Consortium. They studied the role of maternal autologous neutralizing antibody (aNAB) in selective transmission of HIV-1. All of the deliveries during the study period, which lasted from 1989 to 1996, occurred before zidovudine (ZDV) prophylaxis was routinely used to prevent perinatal transmission of HIV-1. Researchers found that women who transmitted the virus to their offspring were significantly less likely to have aNAB, which neutralizes the virus, than non-transmitting mothers (14.3 percent, compared with 76.5 percent). This suggests that the antibody has a potent protective or selective effect in perinatal HIV transmission. This study also found that the closest match to the transmitted virus to the baby was the mother's neutralization-escape virus.