A study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 6 has found a critical biological pathway that appears to be a key player in the development of food allergies - and will speed up pharmaceutical research into new treatments.

Dr Marc E Rothenberg, senior author of the study, said that the discovery could lead quickly to clinical trials of drugs to block eotaxin, which helps to trigger allergic reactions in the digestive tract. Eotaxin is a chemokine, a family of chemicals that are a major player in the body’s reaction to a food allergen. Eotaxin helps to move eosinophils, a type of blood cell, into inflamed tissues.

Rothenberg and lead author Simon P. Hogan were responsible for the development of a new approach to analyzing food allergies. They excluded anaphylaxis from their research and focused on other allergic responses. This focus led them to the inflammatory response in the gut that is governed by eotaxin.

Their research was based on a laboratory experiment using mice. Mice were given allergenic substances orally. Researchers found that eosinophil cells began to build up in both the blood and the small intestine of normal mice. Then, these results were compared to genetically engineered mice who had no eotaxin. In these mice, even when they had eaten allergenic substances, there was no eosinophil in the small intestine; eosinophil was only found in the blood. In other words, blocking eotaxin blocked the allergic reaction inside the digestive tract.

Rothenberg said that pharmaceutical companies are currently working on compounds that would block chemokines like eotaxin, and that this research would lead to a rapid application to digestive system allergy.

Allergies are a 20th century epidemic with as much as 30 per cent of people suffering with them. Of concern to scientists is that not only has the rate of allergy increased, but allergies to common environmental substances, such as foods, are also increasing.

Source: Bio-Medicine