Allergy Treatment with Fewer Shots, Better Control

Current immunotherapy requires a six-month build-up of injections, with maintenance injections over three to five years. The study was conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical School (Baltimore, MD, USA) and presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in New York (AAAI, NY, USA).

To create the new therapy, scientists attached immune-boosting molecules to the major ragweed protein responsible for allergic reactions. Each study participant who had positive skin-test reactions to ragweed pollen received six injections of the immunotherapy. Preliminary results revealed a reduction in symptoms more than twice that of patients receiving placebo. The treatment nearly eliminates the need for medications such as antihistamines and decongestants and is substantially safer than conventional allergy injections, the scientists report. The new therapy was produced by Dynavax Technologies Corp. (Berkeley, CA, USA).

"This study demonstrates that we can induce a clear clinical response in ragweed-allergic patients with a brief six-week, six-injection regimen,” said Peter Creticos, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Hopkins and principal investigator of the study. Although conventional allergy injections pose the risk of patients developing an allergic reaction to the injections themselves, the new drug was well tolerated and caused no systemic allergic reactions.




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