Australian Researchers Achieve ‘Life-Changing’ Peanut Allergy Breakthrough

The Murdoch Childrens Research Institute has successfully completed a new immunotherapy trial, curing two-thirds of its young subjects of their peanut allergies.

Head Researcher Professor Mimi Tang and her team have found a peanut desensitization therapy so effective that two-thirds of the child participants were found to be “eating peanut freely in their diet without having to follow any particular program of peanut intake in the years after treatment was completed.”

Their method combines peanut-based oral immunotherapy with a probiotic to “nudge” an individual’s immune system into changing its violent response to the allergen. At the end of the initial 2013 trial, 82 percent of the children given the treatment had developed a tolerance for peanuts, as opposed to 4 percent in the placebo group. They are very hopeful numbers.

The probiotic, known as lactobacillus rhamnosus, was administered to children alongside peanut protein, in gradually increasing amounts. Four years later, 70 percent of those treated had remained completely tolerant of the formerly dangerous substance.

The treatment will face broader clinical studies, but Professor Tang firmly believes that it is “a major step forward in identifying an effective treatment to address the food allergy problem in western societies.” She is understandably proud of the work they have done, and its dramatic result:

The way I see it is that we had children who came into the study allergic to peanuts, having to avoid peanuts in their diet, being very vigilant around that, carrying a lot of anxiety with that and, at the end of treatment and even four years later, many of these children who had benefited from our probiotic peanut therapy could now live like a child who didn’t have peanut allergy.

For parents of the millions of children with potentially life-threatening peanut allergies, that excitement is sure to be contagious.

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