By Henry Ehrlich
Two years ago, I had the good fortune to be given a ticket to the inaugural fundraiser for End Allergies Together, Inc. “EAT”, the brainchild of Connecticut food allergy mothers, Elise Bates and Kim Hall, who wondered where the big ideas were going to come to cure their children. They started the organization on a unique premise—that they would raise money exclusively for research, with minimal overhead. With backgrounds in business they had a feel for how good ideas are funded and nurtured for years before paying off. Somewhere, in laboratories around the world, there were the seeds of big breakthroughs that haven’t found the requisite resources to get them off the ground. Today, EAT has gone through a couple of years of grant making, so I reached out to them to catch up on their experience. Elise and board member Ellen-Jane Moss sat still to answer some questions. Henry Ehrlich
AAC: First, thanks very much for taking time for our readers. How is the work going? Are you sticking to the original premise, or do you feel the pull of “mission creep”?
Elise: And thank you for the opportunity. Let me assure you that we’re definitely sticking with the original premise. Before EAT was formed we analyzed the field and saw there were nowhere near enough dollars going into research. At the time the NIH was only funding $37 million into food allergy, which afflicts 1 in 12 children in the US compared to $232 million for autism (1 in 45) and over $1B for diabetes (1 in 400). The NIH budget is now up to $76mm but that’s not nearly enough, so we aren’t looking for more to do. We continue to believe the research is underfunded and EAT is the only non-profit exclusively focused on funding food allergy research.
AAC: When we spoke on the phone, I wrote down the words “before, during, after”. As I recall our conversation, this describes the way you look at submissions. Before—causation. During— diagnostic. After—treatment. I certainly see how your current projects fall into one or the other. Do those categories guide your thinking?
Ellen-Jane: We don’t necessarily look at submissions that way but we do fund research across those areas. The items we are focused on when selecting a grant recipient are 1) the quality of the study design, 2) collaborative efforts across institutions and 3) efforts that can use human samples to the extent possible.
The first three grants were funded out of a process that had a broad focus and included the following categories: 1) determining triggers of food allergy, 2) identifying and further understanding the fundamental mechanism of FA, 3) finding better biomarkers, and 4) finding new treatment modalities.
The grants were: 1) Improving safety for the Food Allergy-Asthma Syndrome – With the interest in OIT becoming increasing more popular, there is a need to better understand who is at increased risk for more severe reactions. This study looks at the underlying immunological mechanisms of the increased risk in order to figure out how to make OIT a safer process.
2) Prebiotic Dietary Fibers to Prevent or Treat Food Allergy – This study analyzes whether specific formulations of insoluble dietary fiber can expand butyrate producing Clostridia which can protect against allergic sensitization to food. The allergy protective capacity is contained within the Clostridia, a class of bacteria in the intestinal mucus, close to the epithelium.
3) Biomarkers IgE: ‘Molecular Gene Expression During Reactions to Food: 
Identifying Signatures Which Correlate with Severity of Reaction – The goal of this study is to look at identifying molecular signatures that are expressed during allergic reactions to peanut so we can see how these signature correlate with patterns of symptoms in order to identify a better biomarker for detecting the severity of a food allergy.
To comprehend the selections, which are, by the way, made by a distinguished medical advisory board, here are our articulated goals:
• Advance scientific and medical research to accelerate diagnostics, treatments, cures and prevention of food allergy
• Understand underlying immune mechanisms
• Determine genetic and epigenetic factors of food allergy prevalence
• Discover role of microbiome in food allergy
• Understand basic biology to surface key targets for breakthrough treatments
• Identify and accelerate short-term therapies to increase quality of life in patient subsets
There’s an added benefit. The structure we created came in handy when EAT was approached by a donor who was interested in funding a dedicated grant outside the normal deliberations process. to find less invasive biomarkers to diagnose and monitor EoE in pediatric patients. This donor was able to use EAT’s medical advisory board to help guide them and two projects resulted – 1) Use of Esophageal String Test to Understand Symptoms, Inflammation and Function in EoE and 2) Developing Non-Invasive Biomarkers for EoE by Genetic Testing and Molecular Profiling of the Buccal Mucosa (Cheek Swab).
AAC: Oh, that answers one of my questions about a special interest in non-invasive, bio-marker techniques because I saw those projects. Let me continue.
Your organization has a lot of business experience and savvy, and you are fluent in stages of capital investment—angel, venture, mezzanine, and so forth. What are the steps forward for the work you are funding? Is it more basic science and the NIH? Is it through private investment and the marketplace.
Elise: For us funding more basic science is critical as we need to get more research and clinical trials into the pipeline so there will be more treatments available. As we have heard many clinicians and researchers say, there is not going to be one treatment that works for everyone, so we need many options to help the food allergy community, just as there are with other diseases. Those later stages of development will take much larger resources than we currently have at our disposal—NIH grants and industry funding. So we are looking to find more bright ideas.
The research in basic science is critical but it takes time and while we are waiting for those answers and treatment, we will continue to fund projects as we have done in the past that can help in the short term, such as better diagnostics.
There has to be a team effort to get to better answers – more money from both the public and private sectors and getting more people engaged in this important research. The majority of our donors were not actively funding research before they started supporting EAT so we are proud of the fact that we have helped to grow the pool of people funding this critical work.
AAC: This website has readers around the world, some of them eminent researchers. In fact, one of them is already part of one of your project teams. What would you like to say to the ones who have not heard of EAT who might like a new source of funds for their work?
Ellen-Jane: Please subscribe to our email list and follow us on social media so you can stay up to speed on EAT’s granting cycle and events! Please reach out to us if you are looking for funding on specific projects as it can help inform our decisions on future projects. research@endallergiestogether.com
Research EAT has funded:
Biomarkers
‘Molecular Gene Expression During Allergic Reactions to Food: Identifying Signatures Which Correlate with Severity of Reaction’
Jonathan M. Spergel, MD, PhD, Division of Allergy-Immunology, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania
Paul J. Turner, FRACP PhD, Section of Pediatrics (Allergy-Immunology), Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, United Kingdom.
More Information
‘Developing Non-Invasive Biomarkers for Eosinophilic Esophagitis by Molecular Profiling of the Buccal Mucosa’
Marc E. Rothenberg, MD, PhD, Director, Division of Allergy and Immunology; Director, Cincinnati Center for Eosinophilic Disorders, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
Leah Kottyan, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine Center for Autoimmune Genomics and Etiology (CAGE) , Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
Microbiome
‘Characterization of Prebiotic Dietary Fibers to Prevent or Treat Food Allergy’
Cathryn R. Nagler, PhD, Bunning Food Allergy Professor, Professor of Pathology, Medicine, Pediatrics and The College, The University of Chicago
More Information
Oral Immunotherapy
‘Improving Safety for the Food Allergy-Asthma Syndrome’
Sharon Chinthrajah, MD, Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Allergy and Immunology, Sean N Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research, Stanford University
More Information
Eosinophilic Esophagitis
‘Use of Esophageal String Test to understand symptoms, inflammation and function in eosinophilic esophagitis.’
Glenn Furuta, MD, Director, Gastrointestinal Eosinophilic Disease Program Le Cache Endowed Chair for GI Allergic and Immunologic Diseases, Children’s Hospital Colorado
Jonathan M. Spergel, MD, PhD, Division of Allergy-Immunology, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania
Basic Science:
Researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, its partner institutions and Yale School of Medicine have launched an initiative to tackle the science of food allergies. The Food Allergy Science Initiative (FASI), centered at the Broad, taps the combined resources of participating academic and research institutions to help answer key scientific questions surrounding food allergies, the causes of which remain little-understood.