Living with one food allergy is a challenge; living with more than one can make ordinary activities such as eating at a restaurant feel downright impossible.
That’s because the standard medical advice for the 4 million Americans with food allergies is to avoid all of your allergy triggers, all the time – and, by the way, make sure you always carry injectable epinephrine in case you accidentally eat something contaminated with a food that triggers anaphylactic shock.
So it will be welcome news to these food-allergy sufferers to hear that a Stanford team is making progress on a new way to help them. In research published today in the journal Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology, a team led by Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, found that an experimental treatment already being widely tested for single food allergies, called oral immunotherapy, could be modified so that patients can be desensitized to multiple food allergens at the same time. The results now being reported are the products of a pair of phase-1 safety trials.
In our press release about the findings, Nadeau explained why she wanted to develop the new therapy:
“Parents came up to me and said things like, ‘It’s great that you’re desensitizing children to their peanut or milk allergies, but my daughter is allergic to wheat, cashews, eggs and almonds. What can you do about that?’” said Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics at the medical school and an immunologist at Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. Nadeau is the senior author of the new study.
... [O]ral immunotherapy is still experimental and quite slow: In prior studies, patients took as long as three years to become desensitized to one food. Being desensitized to several foods, one at a time, could prospectively take decades. Yet Stanford researchers succeeded in safely desensitizing patients to several food allergens at once and were able to speed up desensitization by supplementing oral immunotherapy with injections of omalizumab (brand name Xolair).
With omalizumab, patients were desensitized to up to five of their allergens in a median of 18 weeks; without the medication, the same process took a median of 85 weeks, the research team found. The published results add weight to the anecdotal findings from three of Nadeau's patients who participated in the trial and shared their experience in a story in the New York Times magazine last spring.
The researchers stress that the treatment is still experimental and must be performed in a hospital setting, but they are excited by the next step in the process: a phase-2 trial to evaluate the therapy more rigorously in a larger number of patients. The phase-2 trial will be conducted at Stanford, where recruitment of new patients has already begun, and at four other centers across the country, which will begin recruiting patients in the coming months. Individuals who are interested in learning more about participating in the new studies can check the federal clinical trials website for opportunities in their region.
Previously: Researchers show how DNA-based test could keep peanut allergy at bay, A mom's perspective on a food allergy trial and Searching for a cure for pediatric food allergies
Photo by Logan Brumm Photography and Design
