New Food Allergy Treatment on the Horizon?

By Kelley Lindberg

Dr. Fred Finkelman
(photo courtesy of FARE)

FARE (Food Allergy Research and Education) is reporting today that they’re awarding a $734,986 research grant to leading immunologist Fred Finkelman, M.D., at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine/Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, in his efforts to suppress anaphylaxis. Dr. Finkelman is developing a therapy that may be able to desensitize a patient to ALL of their food allergies at the same time, and potentially in as short a time period as 24 hours.

With this therapy, a patient would probably be injected with a unique antibody that Finkelman and his team have developed in their lab. The antibody would then target mast cells and remove the IgE and IgE receptors on those mast cells, which are responsible for releasing the chemicals that cause the symptoms of an allergic reaction. In a previous study, Dr. Finkelman injected mice with this antibody, and the treatment prevented anaphylaxis.

In plain English, this means that after being injected with this new antibody, the patient’s body will stop reacting to food allergens!

Right now, Dr. Finkelman and his team are still working with mice, so human trials are still years away. And their therapy in mice has taken weeks to build up a resistance, so they are hoping to shorten that timeframe significantly with their future study. Dr. Finkelman emphasizes that his process would not cure allergies, but would suppress allergies. He believes it has the potential to suppress food allergies, skin allergies, and even asthma and environmental allergies (hay fever). But this is the type of therapy that so many of us are desperately hoping for, so I am thrilled and grateful to FARE for supporting Dr. Finkelman’s research with this significant grant.

To read more about this grant and Dr. Finkelman’s work, check out these links:

• “New Study Aims for Quick Suppression of Food Allergies”
• “A Conversation with FARE Grant Recipient Fred Finkelman,MD”
• “Suppressing Food Allergies Quickly Is the Goal of UC Research Team”

New York Times Magazine: “The Allergy Buster”

by Kelley Lindberg

"Your child is always playing near a precipice that is visible only to you: you may be able to keep her from falling off, but you can never move her away from the edge.” --Melanie Thernstrom, "The Allergy Buster"

A cure. That’s what we want. It’s what millions of kids (and millions more adults) need. Is there one tantalizingly close? It looks more and more like that answer could be “yes.”

 

Oral desensitization is one of the most promising treatments for food allergies being studied today. By introducing a carefully measured, incredibly tiny amount of the allergen every day, increasing it slightly at specific intervals over the course of several years, researchers are demonstrating that many of their patients are eventually able to tolerate the food allergen safely.

 

However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. The amounts must be carefully measured – not something you can do in your own kitchen with a blender and a measuring spoon. Many patients in these studies still have anaphylactic reactions to the dosage and must be treated with epinephrine shots, steroids, and antihistamines. The patients have to carefully control their activity level after taking the dose, because increased body heat can trigger reactions. Timing, commitment, control, and monitoring are essential so that the treatment doesn’t become the trigger for a life-threatening reaction.

 

And after several years of treatment, when the patient appears to be “cured,” the understanding now is that he or she will have to eat that allergen every single day to prevent the allergy from returning. For a nut, that could be a serving of 16 nuts every day. If it turns out you don’t actually enjoy the taste of that food, that could be a difficult life sentence to face.

 

But despite the downsides, oral desensitization is still the most exciting possibility for a cure on the horizon, and it’s one that many of us are anxiously awaiting. I desperately want my son to be able to go to college and leave his food allergies safely behind. So I was very encouraged to read this informative and thought-provoking article by Melanie Thernstrom on the New York Times Magazine website: “TheAllergy Buster: Can a Radical New Treatment Save Children With Severe FoodAllergies?”

 

Thernstrom talks about a trial her son in participating in that is going beyond the single-allergen desensitization method to multiple-allergy desensitization. The article is long, but well worth the time to read.

 

That light at the end of the tunnel may be getting closer after all.