Food Allergy Research Consortium Launched

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it will be funding a new Food Allergy Research Consortium. The consortium, led by Hugh Sampson, M.D., at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, will receive approximately $17 million over five years from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an NIH division. In addition, a five-year NIAID grant totaling approximately $5 million to the Emmes Corporation, of Rockville, MD, will fund a statistical center to support the consortium.

NIAID’s Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation director Daniel Rotrosen, M.D. said, "The expertise of the Food Allergy Research Consortium provides a unique opportunity to investigate basic immunologic mechanisms associated with food allergy in animal models and humans, and, ultimately, to test novel therapies to treat food allergy.”

A potential peanut allergy therapy will be tested first.

The consortium’s second project is an observational study that will enroll 400 infants who have allergies to milk or eggs. Such children are at higher risk of developing peanut allergy, but the vast majority will lose their allergies to those foods as they grow up. The study will follow the children for at least five years and study immunologic changes that accompany the loss of allergy to foods and the development of allergy to new foods. This study will be led by Scott Sicherer, M.D., at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

The clinical and observational studies will take place at five clinical sites:

• Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York; Principal Investigator: Hugh Sampson, M.D.
  
• Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore; Principal Investigator: Robert Wood, M.D.
  
• Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC; Principal Investigator: Wesley Burks, M.D.
  
• University of Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute, Little Rock; Principal Investigator: Stacie Jones, M.D.
  
• National Jewish Medical and Research Center, Denver; Principal Investigator: Donald Leung, M.D., Ph.D.

For information about participating in the Food Allergy Research Consortium’s clinical and observational studies, please call the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Pediatric Allergy Division, at (212) 241-5548.

All information and quotes taken from the press release on the NIH site (www.nih.gov).