25 Jul The Peanut Allergy Cure

Every year, Americans make 30,000 emergency room visits because of food allergies, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Even touching a surface that previously held peanuts can trigger anaphylaxis, a life-threatening allergic reaction. When a peanut-allergic person starts feeling their throat close up, they stab themselves with an epinephrine, or adrenaline, device and then head to the ER for a few hours of monitoring.

What if there was another way?

Researchers, doctors and pharmaceutical companies are trying to make people less allergic to peanuts. A peanut pill and a patch could be widely available by the end of 2019.

And in the meantime, a small number of private-practice allergists have been offering oral immunotherapy, in which you gradually eat more peanut products under a doctor’s supervision.

Right now, the majority of allergists only prescribe patients an epinephrine device and tell them to strictly avoid peanut protein, in hopes of warding off reactions such as hives, swelling, blood pressure loss and difficulty breathing. The FDA has not approved any treatments for peanut allergies, which affect 2 percent of children today.

“Our hope all the time is to make a cure, to make this go away permanently and never have to worry about it,” said Dr. Edwin Kim, a researcher at the Food Allergy Institute and the father of a peanut-allergic child. “These kids don’t want to think about it. They don’t want to have to worry about it. They want to be normal.”

Updosing and maintenance

For decades, people with “hay fever” or other environmental allergies have received allergy shots. Allergists inject you with increasing amounts of serum derived from whatever you’re allergic to, building up your tolerance for the allergen. You start twice a week and stretch out the time between injections. After several years, you’ll no longer need the shots.

“What we found out in the ’80s and ’90s was that doing something similar, like putting peanuts into an allergy shot, wasn’t effective,” Kim said. “That’s where the idea of oral immunotherapy was born, since eating the food is how your body learns to tolerate it.”

Oral immunotherapy, or OIT, works the same way the allergy shots do: slowly up your tolerance for the allergen, until you no longer have allergic reactions to it. You start with a very small amount of the food, check to make sure you don’t have any reactions, and then gradually increase that amount in a process called updosing.

Dr. Wesley Burks at Duke University first demonstrated how to increase patients’ tolerance to peanuts in 2009. His 29 patients then started with mixing a few crumbs of peanut flour into applesauce or pudding, then updosed for months by eating a little more each day to build up tolerance for the allergen.

Once they passed a “food challenge” of eating about 16 peanuts at once, the patients entered maintenance, which meant they ate eight peanuts a day for years afterward. Every OIT study since then has followed a similar updose and maintenance pattern, with some including the food challenge.

The path to the peanut pill

In 2011, a parent-run nonprofit brought together representatives from the National Institute of Health, the FDA, pharmaceutical companies and academic centers including Duke to figure out how to cure food allergies. Aimmune formed from that meeting.

“They asked: ‘What will it take to get a treatment approved for food allergies?’ ” said Dr. Daniel Adelman, Aimmune’s chief medical officer. “We needed a high quality, reproducible, reliable product, and there was no such thing at the time.”

By 2013, the company created AR101, capsules of proprietary peanut flour that come with a standardized updose and maintenance schedule. As in the 2009 Duke study, patients mix the peanut product with food and eat it. Aimmune has tested AR101 on more than 1,000 patients.

By the end of this year, Aimmune will apply to the FDA for a license to sell AR101 in the U.S., Adelman said.

At the same time, another company hopes to offer a “peanut patch,” called Viaskin, which patients will wear for increasing amounts of time to updose and then will wear all the time for maintenance.

If they pass, AR101 and Viaskin will be the first FDA-approved products to treat peanut allergies.

Peanut growers hopeful

About one in 13 children have at least one food allergy, according to the nonprofit organization Food Allergy Research & Education, and up to 15 million Americans total. Researchers, nonprofits and industry members have been scrambling for solutions for decades.

Since 2001, the National Peanut Board has put over $25.3 million toward peanut allergy research, including sending funding to Burks, the lead researcher of the 2009 Duke study. They also supported a 2015 study that showed that parents should offer peanut products to very young children at risk of peanut allergy, in hopes of preventing the allergy.

“For years, pediatricians had been telling parents to wait until the child is 2 years old before peanuts are introduced, and the (2015) study proved that is not the right way to go and that early introduction is going to be a deterrent to keep children from developing peanut allergies,” said Bob Sutter of the North Carolina Peanut Growers Association.

Funding from the National Peanut Board and nonprofit organizations support academic research in labs and with small samples, then larger pharmaceutical companies step in for large-scale development and deployment.

If the FDA approves every product, parents will have several options if they can find willing allergists: the pill, the patch, drops under the tongue and private-practice OIT.

Many public schools do not have nut-free classrooms. Elias sits at the same lunch table each day for children with allergies, and teachers wipe him with soap and water before eating, as opposed to just water like allergy-free children. Using OIT to increase his tolerance for peanuts has helped the entire family, Kroboth said.

“There’s no doubt in my mind if we had not done OIT it would have been a traumatic first year of school,” Kroboth said. “We eat out, we fly, we’ve been on vacation, and these are all things we did not do in the beginning and we now do without fear. It’s life changing.”