Microneedles for treatment of peanut allergy Peanut allergy is a life-threatening condition. About 1% of the US population (~3 million people) has peanut allergies, and there is no FDA-approved treatment. Strict avoidance, and a peanut-free diet is the only option available to manage peanut allergies, which imposes severe limitations on the lifestyle of the patient and their families, and can lead to nutritional deficiencies. The overall goal of this proposal is to develop a coated microneedles (MNs) based cutaneous immunotherapy (CIT) a.k.a (MNs-CIT) for peanut allergy. Presently peanut oral immunotherapy has received much attention. However, a major limitation of oral immunotherapy is that the peanut oral dose is escalated to thousands of milligrams, which causes adverse effects. Based on our preliminary data our hypothesis is that MNs coated with peanut allergen can safely deliver peanut allergen in to the superficial skin-layer to produce long-lasting peanut desensitization.
Our specific aims are: (i) Develop PE- coated MNs and evaluate their short and long term therapeutic effectiveness in treating peanut allergy, (ii) Characterize the mechanism of peanut MNs-CIT, and (iii) Evaluate therapeutic efficacy in a neonatal pig model of peanut allergy. If successful, these studies will provide the foundation to support the development of a novel and safer peanut allergy immunotherapy treatment.
This project focuses on the development of microneedles for peanut immunotherapy. Successful completion of the project may in the long run provide treatment for peanut allergy, for which currently there is no approved therapy.
