One in 10 adults and one in 13 children have food allergies, enough for the Food Allergy Research & Education association to declare an epidemic.
Among the most common and proliferating allergies are reactions to peanuts. The allergy association says data from insurance claims found the annual incidence of peanut allergy in 1-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017, and reactions are also increasing in adults.
As common as this potentially life-threatening allergy is, little is known what bodily mechanisms and food interactions are responsible for the allergic reactions, says Jing-Ke Weng, a Northeastern University expert in plant chemistry.
Weng and collaborator Dr. Seth Rakoff-Nahoum at Boston Children’s Hospital are looking to unlock this mystery with the help of a recently awarded Pew Innovation Fund grant they say could lay the foundation for therapies to fight food allergies.
There is even a possibility that peanut plants can be engineered so they don’t cause allergies in the first place, says Weng, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and bioengineering.
Weng and Rakoff-Nahoum will use isotopic labeling of peanut plant proteins to precisely trace the food molecules’ pathways, modifications and host interactions to see where allergic reactions originate in the body.
“The award supports a project the two of us have been talking about for a very long time to map the food biogeography,” Weng says.
“We actually do not know in which parts of the GI tract (plant) proteins are being perceived by our immune system to be potentially dangerous,” he says.
“Our hypothesis is that some of the allergy-causing proteins are very stable, so they actually survive exposure to the stomach acid.”
The research aims to pinpoint where peanut proteins interact with immune cells and trigger an allergic response, whether in the small intestine, spleen, liver or another location, Weng says.
The researchers will follow the path of the peanut proteins by incorporating stable isotopes into them to make them a bit heavier than their otherwise identical naturally produced counterparts.
“Let’s say we grow peanut plants in a growth chamber and feed them with carbon-13 labeled carbon dioxide,” a naturally occurring isotope that is heavier than the standard carbon-12 isotope, Weng says.
“As the plants mature and incorporate this labeled carbon dioxide into their biomass in the seeds, it’ll carry a percentage of proteins that are a little bit heavier. We can feed these peanuts to an animal and be able to track exactly which protein landed where,” he says.
“We want to know which organ is actually responsible for the initial recognition of antigens on peanut proteins,” Weng says.
“We want to know exactly where this process is happening. We want to map that,” he says. “If we understand that exact molecular recognition, it’s really the lock and key.”
Let’s say an allergy-causing protein interacts with a subset of T cell receptors in the small intestine, he says.
“We can potentially design a therapeutic intervention,” Weng says. “We’re doing basic science addressing very basic questions that are important. But it will have implications in therapeutic design.”
Coming up with therapeutic candidates would be a next step and one that he and Rakoff-Nahoum are prepared to tackle, says Weng, who has a background in drug discovery.
Therapies could potentially include antibody treatment or vaccines, Weng says.
“We also have entertained the idea of engineering plants to have specific mutations in a particular region of the protein that’s causing the allergy,” he says. “Maybe it’s a very subtle change in the peanut, but then the peanut would not be able to cause an allergy.”
The researchers will also look at whether the general principles they discover studying peanuts also apply to many different types of allergen proteins, Weng says.
He and Rakoff-Nahoum are one of 16 pairs of scientists from different disciplines receiving the innovation awards.
The two researchers have been collaborating in recent years on how plant molecules affect the human microbiome, Weng says.
“We have a very common interest in how plant foods interact with the human body,” he says. “You can think there is this tripartite interaction. You have plants, you have humans eating plant foods and then you also have the microbes living in the human gut that help digest these foods.”