Robert Wood, director of pediatric allergy and immunology at Johns Hopkins, discusses “Omalizumab for the Treatment of Multiple Food Allergy,” — his recent groundbreaking study.
Hi, my name is Doctor Robert Wood and I'm director of the Division of pediatric allergy immunology and rheumatology here at the Johns Hopson Children's Center. I'm here to talk to you today about ex exciting new study that we recently published on the treatment for food allergy. Now, why is this important? The reality is we have not had treatment for food allergy for time eternity. We have told our patients to avoid what they're allergic to and to carry emergency medications to use in the event of an accidental exposure. We had the opportunity in this new study to look at a drug called Zola, a drug that's actually been approved to treat asthma for over 20 years for its potential benefit in treating food allergy. We've done some small studies to suggest that it probably did work, probably worked very well, but we had to do the right study to have the opportunity to bring this treatment through FDA approval to our patients. The outmatch study, which is what we called this trial, enrolled 100 and 80 Children and adults mostly aged 17 and below and treated them with Zola. After doing baseline food challenges to assess their level of allergy to peanut and at least two other foods including milk, egg, wheat, cashew, walnut, and hazelnut. This is an injectable therapy and the patients received injections every two weeks or every four weeks. Over the next 16 weeks after which they underwent another set of food challenges to determine if their level of reaction to each food was changed by the treatment with Zola. Compared to placebo. We found very positive results. As an example for peanut, 67% of those treated with the real drug compared to placebo could tolerate a moderate to large amount of peanut without having a reaction. The same turned out to be true for all of the six other foods seeing a very significant difference between the real drug and placebo. We've been very fortunate now to not just publish this paper but to see this drug go through the FD approval process so that we actually have accomplished our original goal was to bring this potentially life changing therapy to our patients with food allergy. And we expect that this will be a real difference maker for many of the 17 million Americans who suffer from true food allergy.
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