Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
A new skin patch could help protect people suffering from potentially life-threatening peanut allergies by significantly increasing the amount of exposure needed to elicit a reaction.
According to The Seattle Times, use of the Viaskin Peanut patch upped the amount of peanut protein required to trigger an allergic reaction by at least 10-fold in an early stage clinical trial.
The patch, which was developed by French biotech firm DBV Technologies, was most effective for children under the age of 12, the researchers revealed at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in Houston, Texas on Sunday.
Desensitizing the immune system
The trial examined if the immunotherapy patch could essentially desensitize people to allergic reactions by administering relatively small amounts of peanut proteins into the outer layers of their skin. The goal was to trigger an immune response without releasing antigens into the blood, where they would trigger allergic shock, the newspaper explained.
Participants wearing the highest doses of the patches were able to consume the equivalent of four peanuts without triggering severe reactions, Today.com noted. As a result, those individuals should no longer have to worry about “traces of peanut in a package” from a factory which uses peanuts, or “minor contamination of food in a restaurant,” said lead author Dr. Hugh Sampson.
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Dr. Sampson, a professor of pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine and director of the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai, and his colleagues conducted recruited 221 participants between the ages of six and 55 for a double-blind trial at various locations in the US, Canada, France, Poland and the Netherlands.
Each participant was tested to see how much peanut protein it took to trigger a reaction, and were then asked to wear the adhesive patches, which were infused with doses of between 50 and 250 micrograms of peanut protein. One year later, they were tested a second time to determine if their reaction thresholds had increased over that period.
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The 250-microgram patch was found to be the most effective, Dr. Sampson said, and more than 53 percent of children between the ages of six and 11 responded to the patch (compared to under 20 percent for a placebo). None of the patients required epinephrine injections to stop allergic reactions associated with the path itself, indicating that it is safe, the Times added.
We’re the allergic kids in America, woah-oh
Approximately 15 million people in the US have food allergies, and statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that the rate of peanut allergies in children tripled between 1997 and 2008, the newspaper said. In light of those figures, the results of the new trial are encouraging, according to Food Allergy Research & Education’s Dr. James Baker.
“The goal for most practicing allergists and for most parents is to get a child to the point where if there is an accidental ingestion of peanut it would not be as risky or life-threatening,” Dr. Amy Stallings, an assistant professor of pediatrics in the division of allergy and immunology at the Duke University Medical Center who is not affiliated with the new study, told Today. “And the patch may be a way of doing this that is safer.”
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The next step will be for the patch to undergo a Phase III clinical trial, and if the results from that are positive, it will be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for evaluation. However, Dr. Sampson cautioned that, even in a best-case scenario, it will likely be several more years before it becomes available to the general public.
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