Monday, April 27, 2015

Funding better "biomarkers" for food allergies

Update 5/1/15: Congratulations on surpassing the $50,000 funding goal before the April 30th deadline! Here are two wonderful summaries of the effort: Caroline Moassessi of Grateful Foodie and Henry Ehrlich at Asthma Allergies Children weigh in.

When our food allergy journey started out, one of the most challenging things to wrap my head around was allergy testing. I distinctly remember looking incredulously at our allergist and thinking, “You mean to tell me that a “positive” blood test or that giant hive from a skin prick test doesn’t necessarily mean our son has a REAL food allergy? What good is that?!”
Two common allergy tests rely on the IgE antibody as a "biomarker." The tips of the IgE antibody recognize specific food proteins, such as those found in a peanut. Blood tests measure the amount of IgE for a specific food that is found in the blood and skin prick tests look for the result of a food protein binding to IgE attached to a mast cell in the skin. The release of histamine (among other chemicals) causes the wheal or hive in a skin prick test. Image source: Atlas of Allergic Diseases



What I have learned over the course of several years is that there really are no great tests for food allergies – i.e. “biomarkers” –aside from actually consuming the food (oral food challenge supervised by a clinician). The two common current methods of testing - blood tests measuring food-specific blood IgE levels and skin prick tests that scratch the allergen into the skin surface are not a great tests because they frequently give “false positive” results. A “false positive” means that a person may test “positive,” but truly isn’t positive should they actually consume the suspected food. Frustrating. On top of this, most current testing methods that rely on IgE as a “biomarker” cannot predict how severe the allergy is. The only sure way to test for a suspected food allergy is to go to your allergist’s office and perform the supervised oral food challenge – you know, the test where you actually eat the suspected allergen and wait for a response. Having done this with my son several times now, I can’t stress enough just how stressful this stressful test is. There has to be a better “biomarker” – a test without the stress and risk of a reaction that can better predict an allergy and its severity. 

Image source: Selena Bluntzer from Amazing and Atopic


To help solve this problem, Dr. Xiu-Min Li, Professor of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and board-certified allergists Dr. Paul Ehrlich and Dr. Purvi Parikh designed a collaborative, practice-based study whose primary objective is to figure out better biomarkers of allergy (details of the study and how you can directly fund the study).