New findings on hepatitis C in infants can lead to improved treatments

“The immune system of the healthy babies shows similar changes to that in babies infected with hepatitis C,” says Niklas Björkström, doctor and researcher at the Department of Medicine, Huddinge, Karolinska Institutet. “This could suggest that the immune cells have encountered the virus in the womb and managed to eliminate it before birth.”

The study was conducted with Maternity Hospital No 16 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Of the 55 pregnant women participating, 40 had an active hepatitis C infection, while the others had antibodies after a previous infection. The babies born to women with an active infection were all considered exposed to the virus; despite this, only three of these 40 babies developed hepatitis C. 

Regular testing

All the infants were monitored up to the age of 18 months through regular testing, and to increase the volume of comparable data, samples were added from 18 infants who had been infected with hepatitis C at birth. 

The study showed that both the babies born with an infection and the babies who had been exposed to the virus by an infected mother had similar changes in their adaptive immune system, with clear adaptations of the B lymphocytes, the role of which is to produce antibodies able to discover and identify alien microbes, such as viruses, bacteria and parasites.

“A possible explanation is that most babies exposed to the virus in utero manage to deal with it, which we can later see by the B lymphocytes,” says Dr Björkström. “One interesting hypothesis is that these cells can contain novel information that we can use to protect ourselves against hepatises C in the future.”

Left untreated

Some 70 million people around the world live with hepatitis C, a disease that if left untreated may lead to liver cirrhosis which in turn increases the risk of liver cancer. Thanks to the recent development of efficacious drugs, the WHO hopes to see the disease eliminated globally by 2030.