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New Gut Bacteria Therapy Could Prevent And Reverse Food Allergies

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Scientists have found that certain beneficial gut bacteria protect against food allergies, the absence of them in the gut is what causes a food allergy.

It’s such a common condition that in America alone, every three minutes a food-related allergic reaction sends someone to the emergency room. For now, the only way to prevent that trip to the hospital is for people to completely avoid the food that causes them to have allergic reactions. Meanwhile, researchers are looking for ways to prevent or reverse food allergies in patients.

checking ingredientsThis search for a treatment method has led a group of scientists at Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, also in Boston, MA, to discover that babies and children with food allergies are missing certain species of gut bacteria. To see if the species really did have a connection to allergies, the team gave the missing bacteria to mice. Lo and behold, the microbes protected the animals from food allergies. Their study suggests that replenishing key gut bacteria could offer a way to treat food allergies.

Co-senior study author Dr. Lynn Bry, director of the Massachusetts Host-Microbiome Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said:

We identified culturable human-origin bacteria that modulate the immune system to become tolerant to food allergens.

gut bacteriaThere have been studies in the past that reached similar conclusions about the links between gut bacteria and food allergies, but they did not conduct detailed analyses of the interactions at the cellular level like these researchers did. Not only did they make the connection between gut bacteria and allergies but they also mapped the mouse cell and bacteria interactions behind the protective effect. Their research was published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Bry said:

This represents a sea change in our approach to therapeutics for food allergies. We’ve identified the microbes that are associated with protection and ones that are associated with food allergies in patients. If we administer defined consortia representing the protective microbes as a therapeutic, not only can we prevent food allergies from happening, but we can reverse existing food allergies in preclinical models. With these microbes, we are resetting the immune system.

The Study

  • Studies were conducted in both humans and preclinical models. They wanted to understand the key bacterial species involved in food allergies.
  • Fecal samples were repeatedly collected (every four to six months) from 56 infants who developed food allergies. They found many differences when comparing their microbiota to 98 infants who did not develop food allergies.
  • Next, fecal microbiota samples from infants both with and without food allergies were transplanted into mice who were sensitized to eggs. The mice who received microbiota from healthy controls were more protected against egg allergy than those who received microbiota from the infants with food allergies.
  • In a separate analysis, using a computational approach, the researchers looked for the differences in the microbes of children with food allergies compared to those without. They wanted to identify microbes associated with the protection of food allergies in patients.
  • Then, they tested to see if orally administering the protective microbes to mice could prevent the development of food allergies. The team developed two consortia of bacteria that were protective.
  • They found that two separate consortia of five or six species of bacteria derived from the human gut that belong to species within the Clostridiales or the Bacteroidetes could suppress food allergies in the mouse model. These species fully protected the mice and kept them resistant to egg allergy.
  • When the team gave the mice other species of bacteria, they did not provide protection.

Co-first author Georg Gerber, MD, PhD, MPH, co-director of the Massachusetts Host-Microbiome Center and chief of the Division of Computational Pathology in the Department of Pathology at the Brigham, said:

It’s very complicated to look at all of the microbes in the gut and make sense of what they may be doing in food allergy, but by using computational approaches, we were able to narrow in on a specific group of microbes that are associated with a protective effect. Being able to drill down from hundreds of microbial species to just five or six or so has implications for therapeutics and, from a basic science perspective, means that we can start to figure out how these specific bacteria are conferring protection.

MicrobiomeThe team’s next step was to look at immunological changes, both in the human infants and in mice to understand how the bacteria species might be influencing food allergy susceptibility. When they did this they found that the Clostridiales and Bacteroidetes consortia targeted two important immunological pathways and stimulated specific regulatory T cells, a class of cells that modulate the immune system, changing their profile to promote tolerant responses instead of allergic responses.

Bry said:

When you can get down to a mechanistic understanding of what microbes, microbial products, and targets on the patient side are involved, not only are you doing great science, but it also opens up the opportunity for finding a better therapeutic and a better diagnostic approach to disease. With food allergies, this has given us a credible therapeutic that we can now take forward for patient care.

Ultimately, what this study reveals is a potential new method to treat food allergies, one that uses beneficial bacteria to alter the wiring of the immune system. So, instead of targeting a specific food allergen, this method could potentially treat all food allergies in one go.

The post New Gut Bacteria Therapy Could Prevent And Reverse Food Allergies appeared first on Intelligent Living.


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