The Key to A Cure for Food Allergies

Spring has officially sprung! Birds are chirping, and flowers and trees are budding and blooming. It's the time of year when many people experience symptoms from seasonal allergies including sneezing and congestion and other bothersome symptoms.

Spring is also the time of year where we put a spotlight on food allergy in support of the 32 million Americans who are living with potentially life-threatening food allergies, including 5.6 million children, or two in every classroom. In fact, here in New England, Governor Charlie Baker will issue a proclamation declaring May 8th - 14th, 2022 to be Food Allergy Awareness Week throughout the entire Commonwealth.

Every three minutes, a food allergy reaction sends someone to the emergency room. A?food allergy?occurs when the body’s immune system sees a certain food as harmful and reacts by causing symptoms such as hives and vomiting, or even anaphylaxis, which is a life-threatening allergic reaction involving tightening of the airways, swelling of the throat, severely low blood pressure and shock.

Although new treatments are being developed, unfortunately there is no cure for food allergies. According to renowned scientist and computational biologist Aviv Regev, PhD , we know too little about the basic biological mechanisms that underlie these allergies "food allergies is a field we know remarkably little about."

Fortunately there is hope on the horizon! The Food Allergy Science Institute (FASI) was launched at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in 2016 and was spun out in 2021 as an independent nonprofit organization. The mission of FASI is unique, but simple: to accelerate cross-discipline scientific research to develop a cure for food allergy.

FASI is 100% research driven -- they do nothing else but researching food allergy. FASI is a pure discovery engine, a one-of-a-kind scientific network with talent and resources spanning a dozen academic research institutions including The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Yale, Rockefeller University, and The Icahn School of Medicine.

Many people are familiar with FARE (Food Allergy Research & Education) which is a wonderful resource for people and families navigating the world of food allergies. FARE's initiatives include food allergy advocacy, education and training programs, awareness campaigns, and research. FASI's differentiators?include a 100% focus on research with 100% of philanthropic donations directly support FASI's groundbreaking research, and the key to a cure is research.

FASI's other differentiator is it's cross-disciplinary approach which breaks down silos and promotes scientific collaboration and innovation in developing transformative treatments and ultimately a cure for food allergy. FASI represents a paradigm shift in how the entire field of food allergy is approached and includes some of the greatest scientific minds in the world coordinated across diverse fields from immunology and?neuroscience to computational biology and engineering to uncover gaps in scientific knowledge and get closer to a cure.

FASI is led by its Co-Founder and CEO, Christine Olsen, MD , a radiation oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School (in addition to being the mom of a child with food allergy), and its Chief Scientific Officer, Ruslan Medzhitov, PhD , Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at Yale University School of Medicine, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

"As FASI’s director, it’s my mission to ensure that food allergy research gets the scientific attention it deserves, so we can together advance the field and work toward effective treatments and therapeutics that patients urgently need. To develop a cure, we need to understand the disease, and to understand the disease, we need to know its normal biological counterpart. Every disease is an abnormal version of some biological function. -- Ruslan Medzhitov, PhD

FASI has uncovered a major new theory and research direction – the role of the nervous system in food allergies. By increasing our understanding of the?connection between the nervous system and the immune system, FASI's hope is to reverse our bodies from interpreting a food as a noxious substance to understanding that it’s safe for us to consume.

“Millions of patients are waiting for food allergy diagnosis and treatment breakthroughs, as the speed of scientific learning about these conditions has been eclipsed by the growth of food allergies in the population. FASI seeks to accelerate the drug discovery needed to halt this epidemic and enable children and adults living with food allergies to realize improved quality of life, one free from the constant threat of reactions that can include anaphylaxis.” -- Chris Olsen, MD

I'm hoping that you are as excited about FASI as I am, the nation's first cross-disciplinary research nonprofit organization that's 100% dedicated to food allergy research. If you are an investigator interested in joining the FASI network, please reach out and I'll put you in touch! And since FASI is funded by philanthropic donations to support its groundbreaking research, please consider some of the options I outlined below.

HOW TO SUPPORT FOOD ALLERGY SCIENCE:

For major donors, corporate donors, and foundations, please email Kate Todd?[email protected] ?

Individual donors may make a charitable donation to support FASI's research:? https://foodallergyscience.org/make-a-donation/ ?

Connect with FASI on social media to follow the latest food allergy research: @Twitter ,?@LinkedIn ?and?@Facebook