Seeking Vaccine to Fight Deadly Virus

Dr. Kelly MacDonald is the holder of a new $3 million endowed chair created last week at the University of Toronto for AIDS Research, which is jointly funded by the university and the Ontario HIV Treatment Network. University of Toronto is only the second university in Canada (after the University of British Columbia) to establish such a position.

MacDonald has just returned from Kenya, where she spends three months every year studying a group of sex workers and children of HIV-infected mothers, investigating the precise mechanisms that give them greater resistance to the virus. "What we've been looking at are factors that predict immunity to HIV in human populations -- trying to understand what Mother Nature is trying to tell us from exposed, uninfected people and attempting to apply that in vaccine strategies," said MacDonald, who is a microbiologist and infectious disease specialist. MacDonald and her team discovered that some of the Nairobi prostitutes remain HIV-negative despite repeated exposure to the virus.

In a widely cited study, MacDonald and her colleagues also examined HIV transmission from infected mothers to the fetus in utero. They found the risk of HIV transmission was seven times greater if the baby's human leukocyte antigen (HLA) was a perfect match with the mother's HLA than if it was different. From those studies, MacDonald and her team have developed an HIV vaccine based on HLA that they are testing in monkeys and mice. MacDonald and her team are also doing a follow-up study of those African babies who did not get AIDS from their mothers to determine whether they have any other attributes that are important for protection against HIV.

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