A treatment for severe peanut allergies could come in the form of an antibody injection, according to a new pilot study.
While researchers must further test the injection, experts expressed optimism that the study published Thursday in JCI Insight suggests Americans will have multiple ways to prevent life-threatening allergic reactions in the next few years.
“It’s exciting that we can get some options for patients and make sure that they’re safe,” said senior author, Dr. Kari Nadeau, the study’s senior author and a medicine and pediatrics professor at Stanford University, told USA TODAY.
For decades, doctors have advised the up to 32 million Americans with food allergies to avoid the food, said Dr. Thomas Casale, chief medical adviser for operations at Food Allergy Research & Education. Patients could use epinephrine and go to the emergency room after an accidental exposure, but Casale said the need for effective treatment was clear.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for the first time, is expected to approve a peanut allergy treatment by January. Two other medications being tested could be approved by 2022 in the best-case scenario, said Dr. Punita Ponda, associate division chief of allergy and immunology at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York.
As for the study, Nadeau is hopeful the FDA can give the developing treatment a fast-track designation. Ponda, who did not participate in the trial, said the initial results are promising, but researchers need to repeat it on a larger scale.
Twenty people with severe peanut allergies participated in the trial, and researchers gave a quarter of them a placebo and the rest the antibody injection. About two weeks later, the participants tried to eat a single peanut kernel, or about 10 times the amount that triggers a reaction for most people, Nadeau said.
“No one had done that before,” she said. “Fifteen days to see if somebody could eat a whole peanut? We didn’t think that was possible.”
But 73% of the people who received the antibody could eat it without an allergic reaction. Then, 45 days after the single injection, 53% of those people could eat another peanut. In both tests, everyone in the placebo group had a bad reaction.
The antibody injection essentially stops a molecule at the top of the skin from sounding an alarm and activating other allergy cells, Nadeau said.
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Casale, who did not participate in the study, noted that the use of antibodies to stop allergic reactions isn’t new. A 2003 New England Journal of Medicine study tested a different antibody injection on people with peanut allergies.
Treatments similar to the new study also don’t aim to completely stop a patient’s allergic reaction, said Casale, also a professor at the University of South Florida.
“It’s not to the point where you could go to a ballgame and eat a bag of peanuts,” Casale said. “The goal is really to try and prevent you from having that accidental exposure when you go out to eat, or when you have a child and you send them to a birthday party and you’re concerned that somebody might make a dessert with peanuts.”
Still, Ponda said the development of treatment options is thrilling. About 150 people die from food allergies every year and peanuts allergies pose a high risk, said Ponda, also an assistant professor at Hofstra/Northwell.