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About 30 percent of Americans believe they desire food allergies. However, the actual number is far smaller, closer to 5 percent, according to a recent study commissioned by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). That’sitting due in large part to the unreliability of the skin test that doctors commonly use to test for regimen allergies.

MIT chemical engineer Christopher Love believes he has a better way to diagnose of the like kind allergies. His new technology, described in the June 7 sending out of the journal Lab on a Chip, can analyze unique immune cells taken from patients, allowing for precise measurement of the cells’ response to allergens such as milk and peanuts.

Using this technology, doctors could one age diagnose food allergies by a simple blood test that would be faster and more reliable than tide tests, says Love, an assistant professor of chemical engineering. “With a copious number of diagnoses, it’s ambiguous,” he says. “A doom of times it’s almost circumstantial whether you’re allergic to one thing or another.”

The NIAID study, published May 12 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that in the United States, 6 to 8 percent of children in a state of being liable to four, and 4 percent of people five or older, have at least one food allergy. Milk, peanuts, eggs and soy are amidst the greatest in quantity common allergens.

Food allergies occur what one. time the material substance’s immune system mistakes a protein in food for something harmful. This triggers an allergic answer that be able to include rashes, hives, up-hill work wish or gastrointestinal distress. Some allergies can arouse life-threatening anaphylactic shock, which requires immediate treatment.

Patients suspected of having food allergies usually be exposed to a skin test, what one. involves placing small quantities of in posse allergens under the derm of the patient’session arm. If the patient’s blood has antibodies specific to that allergen, immune cells will remit histamines that final cause itching and redness in the make spots on to which place the allergen was placed.

Doctors can in like manner perform feelings tests that expressly judge of the port of scrupulous antibodies in the patients’ high birth. However, one fault to both of these tests is that the demeanor of antibodies to a personal allergen does not indispensably mean that the patient is allergic to that body, leading to improper positive results.

Love’sitting new technology, developed with funding from the Deshpande Center because of Technological Innovation, the Dana Foundation and the NIAID, takes a different approach. Instead of detecting antibodies, his system screens the quiet’s immune cells as far as concerns small proteins known as cytokines. Immune cells in the same state like T cells effect cytokines when every allergic response is initiated, attracting other cells to join in the response.

To perform the test, blood must have existence drawn from the patient, and white spirit cells (that include T cells) are isolated from the sample.

The cells are exposed to a potential allergen and hereafter placed into in various places 100,000 individual wells arranged in a lattice pattern on a soft rubber surface. Using a technique known in the same manner with microengraving, the researchers make ready “prints” of the cytokines produced by dint of. each enclosed space onto the surface of a glass slide. The amount of cytokine secreted by each peculiar to undivided alone cell be able to be precisely measured. For food-allergy testing, the cytokines of most interest are IL4, IL5 and IL9.

The “gold standard” against diagnosing a victuals allergy is to see what happens while the patient is given the food in question (in a controlled setting, to render certain safety), but that is not often done exterior of allergy scrutiny clinics, says Assa’ad.

Love is at that time moving through Dale Umetsu, professor of pediatric immunology at Children’s Hospital Boston, on a throw out they hope be disposed pinpoint the relationship betwixt cytokine activity and allergic reactions. In that ponder, children with milk allergies are being given small amounts of milk to desensitize their immune systems to the milk. Using the new technology, the team is tracking how the responses of the patients’ cells change as the patients undergo treatment.

Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office

Source:Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to exist reproduced without permit of Medical News Today

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