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Treating food allergies might be a simple matter of teaching the immune system a new trick, researchers at Duke Health have found.
In a study using mice bred to have peanut allergies, the Duke researchers were able to reprogram the animals' immune systems using a nanoparticle delivery of molecules to the lymph nodes that switched off the life-threatening reactions to peanut exposures.
[...]
They focused on the Th2-type cytokine immune response, which is increasingly understood as a driver of the overactive immune responses in allergy attacks. In an appropriate immune response, Th2 works in tandem with Th1, but during allergic reactions, Th2 is overproduced and Th1 is diminished.
The solution appears simple enough: deliver more Th1-type cytokines ahead of an allergen exposure to restore balance. But it has proven difficult. A test of this type was attempted as an asthma therapy, but it required a massive dose to the lungs and was ineffective.
In their experiment with the peanut-allergy mice, St. John and colleagues instead delivered antigen- and cytokine-loaded nanoparticles into the skin. The nanoparticles traveled to the lymph nodes, where they dissolved and dispensed their payload at the source of the immune response.
Animals that received this therapy no longer went into an acute allergic response called anaphylaxis when they were subsequently exposed to peanuts. The new-found tolerance was long-lasting, so did not need to be repeated ahead of each exposure to the allergen.
"The Th1 and Th2 sides of immunity balance each other," St. John said. "We reasoned that since we know Th2 immunity is over-produced during allergic responses, why not try to skew the immune response back the other direction? By delivering cytokines to the lymph nodes where immune responses are established, we were able to re-educate the immune system that an allergic response is not an appropriate one."
The approach could theoretically be applied to other allergens, including environmental triggers such as dust and pollen. Additional experiments are underway to move the findings into human trials.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by canopic jug on Friday February 23 2018, @05:09PM
Big pharma controls the research money. Technically the government assigns the grants but since the money comes from industry, they have ultimate veto.
I have an anecdote about "sensitivities" to food. The article mentions allergies specifically and I'm not sure about how that relates to food "sensitivities". Someone I knew long ago got treatment for "sensitivities" and it turned their life around. Before treatment they were basically clobbered by anything and everything they ate. After a meal, they were quite listless and eventually fell asleep. Between meals they were extremely introverted, meek, low energy and avoided any kind of lively interaction and actively fled from the physical vicinity of anything resembling debate even between other people. After the treatment they were pretty much a normal outgoing person who could eat whatever they wanted and started interacting with other people and would even take an opposing viewpoint and defend it. Though they decided not to pick up the habit of eating desert.
Apparently it started out with drastic dietary restrictions combined with specific accupuncture methods. I never got to find out the details or even relevent terms though.
Now back to the matter of funding, I have a general comment: It's always awkward to bring up acupuncture because in a lot of countries there is a lot of quackery going on. Some states in the US, for example, require a medical degree to practice acupuncture. That's fine. What's not fine is that at the very same time some of those states don't require even an hour of formal training in acupuncture itself. That leads to it usually causing injury if it has any effect at all. Big pharma likes it like that. However, with experienced, trained specialist the results can be quite good for specific types of problems.
caveat, I am not a medical doctor and the following was a long time ago and I have not followed the scientific literature on the topc since: I got quite curious about acupuncture in general a few decades ago and, when I should have been spending time on my studies, ended up working through the medical library's journals for everything written on the topic in Western journals. It took about two or two and a half years. It looked to me like the initial rounds of Western research on acupuncture were done partially out of curiosity and with big pharma anticipating it to be debunked. Didn't happen and it turned out be useful in several areas. It was starting to show promise with endocrine problems, if I recall correctly, but that research seemed to get canceled early despite the bright outlook. Not that many years later, big pharma really started pushing hormone replacement therapy among other things.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.