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Welcome to Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast, where we explore the science, stories, and ideas that are changing how we understand the health of women and children—with a particular focus on how the earliest environments of life can shape health for decades to come.
Today we are going deep into one of those earliest environments: the immune conversation between a mother and her developing baby.
My guest is Dr. Judy Van de Water, an internationally recognized immunologist whose work has helped reshape our understanding of the relationship between maternal immune function, pregnancy, and neurodevelopment.
Dr. Van de Water received her Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Davis, in 1978, followed by her PhD in Immunology from UC Davis in 1988. She went on to build her career in clinical immunology and immunopathology and joined the UC Davis Department of Internal Medicine faculty in 1999. She subsequently became part of the newly established UC Davis MIND Institute, where her research increasingly focused on the immunobiology of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Her laboratory has spent decades investigating a fascinating question:
What happens when the maternal immune system interacts differently with the developing fetal brain?
That work has included the study of maternal cytokines and chemokines, immune dysregulation during pregnancy, environmental influences on immune function, and—perhaps most notably—the discovery and characterization of specific maternal autoantibodies that recognize proteins important to fetal brain development.
This research ultimately helped define what is now known as Maternal Autoantibody-Related Autism, or MAR autism—a biologically defined subtype of autism associated with specific patterns of maternal autoantibodies.
And I think her work raises a much larger question.
What if autism is not one biological condition at all?
What if the behavioral diagnosis we call autism represents a final common pathway reached through multiple biological routes—genetic, metabolic, environmental, inflammatory, immunologic, or some combination of them?
If that is true, identifying those biological subtypes becomes incredibly important.
Because once we understand mechanism, we can begin asking better questions about risk, prediction, prevention, and ultimately more precise care.
Today we’ll talk about how these maternal autoantibodies were discovered, why they develop in some women, what the animal and human studies tell us about causality, the science behind MAR autism and MARAbio, and perhaps the biggest question of all:
If we can identify a biological risk pathway before a child is born, what do we do with that information?
Enjoy,
Dr. M