Newsday - April 17, 1992
Laurie Garrett
AIDS researchers said yesterday they plan to begin testing experimental vaccines on babies infected with HIV within about a year.
The vaccine trials will probably be conducted at nine pediatric AIDS medical centers approved by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, including Bronx Lebanon Hospital.
"We are perfectly poised to begin conducting vaccine trials," the University of Massachusetts' Dr. John Sullivan said at a meeting of the institute's advisory panel for the federal AIDS research program. The institute must approve the research design.
"We really have a mandate at this point to bring vaccines to newborns who have been exposed to HIV within the next 10 months. That's really our major goal," Sullivan said.
If a woman is infected with the human immunodeficiency virus during pregnancy, the odds are 30 percent that her baby will also be infected. About 6,000 infected babies were born in the United States last year, said Dr. Phillip Pizzo of the National Cancer Institute, roughly equal to the number of American children who develop cancer annually.
But unlike the children at risk for cancer, babies at risk for AIDS can be identified by their mothers' HIV status even before they test positive for the virus, making them prime subjects for vaccination, Sullivan said. Recent studies, most of which have not yet been published, show most babies are exposed to the virus not while inside the womb, as was previously thought, but during the actual birth process. That information opens the possibility of preventing HIV from taking hold in the infant by vaccinating newborns immediately upon birth if the mothers are HIV positive.
Sullivan and colleagues from the NIH and a variety of AIDS research centers, have formed a pediatric vaccine research group that is currently designing a first round of vaccine trials. Initial studies will have to assess the safety of vaccines on babies with full AIDS, using one of the 10 products already in trials on adults, Sullivan said. These preliminary trials could begin within six months, he said.
If a vaccine proved safe, the next step would be vaccination of newborns, vaccine treatment of the mothers to block transmission, and expanded vaccine trials in Africa, where about 30 percent of all pregnant women in key Subsaharan cities are infected.
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