Oral immunotherapy has come into use as a treatment for food allergies, which affect about 32 million people in the United States. Allergists have begun treating food allergy patients with doses of the food that they are allergic to, to calm their allergic responses. It grew in popularity with the approval of a standardized version, a set of daily capsules to treat the peanut allergy.
But oral immunotherapy also has downsides. It can be nerve-racking, since it involves daily consumption of food that could kill them. It doesn’t work for everyone and does only a little bit to fix the allergy. It mostly means gaining the ability to safely eat several peanuts, rather than having an allergic reaction to just a speck of peanut flour. Nagler and other researchers are working to find ways to treat food allergies more easily and durably. They’re focusing on what they believe is a root cause, imbalances in the community of microbiomes, hoping to let them handle their allergy.
Producing a microbiome-based treatment will be hard, with many details, such as which microbes to provide and how to best deliver them. But the approach is gaining momentum. Nagler’s team and another group reported an important step forward. They prevented severe allergic responses in mice with allergies by getting microbes from non-allergic human babies. So far, there has been a lot of progress to curing food allergies.