A PEANUT THAT WON'T CAUSE ALLERGIC REACTION
A university of Florida scientist has moved one
step closer to his goal of eliminating 99.9 percent of peanut allergens by
removing 80 percent of them in whole peanuts.
Scientists must
eliminate peanut allergens below a certain threshold for patients to be safe,
said Wade Yang, an assistant professor in food science and human nutrition and
member of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
If Yang can cut the
allergens from 150 milligrams of protein per peanut to below 1.5 milligrams, 95
percent of those with peanut allergies would be safe. It’s challenging to
eliminate all peanut allergens, he said, because doing so may risk destroying
peanuts’ texture, color, flavor and nutrition. But he said he’s using novel
methods like pulsed light to reach an allergen level that will protect most
people.
Yang, whose study is
published online in this month’s issue of the journal Food and Bioprocess Technology,
cautioned that he has done peanut allergen experiments only in a laboratory
setting so far. He hopes to eventually conduct clinical trials on animals and
humans.
Dr. Shih-Wen Huang,
professor emeritus in the Department of Pediatrics and Head of the Pediatric
Allergy Clinic at UF Health, is familiar with the UF/IFAS research. Huang
outlined more steps in the peanut allergen research.
The first is to see
if the allergic antibody in the serum of peanut allergy patients will still
bind with the residual allergy protein from the refined peanut products. The
second is to see if the refined peanut extract would elicit skin-test reactions
in peanut allergy patients.
The third step would be to conduct a double blind, placebo-controlled test to
see if patients develop allergy symptoms after eating the refined products.
“I am pleased to see
their work is progressing well,” Huang said. “However, more challenges are
waiting until the final products are accepted from the public, especially the
patients with peanut allergies.”
Two years ago, Yang was using his technique on peanut extract. He’s now testing
it on the peanut itself. In his 2012 study, he removed up to 90 percent of the allergic
potential from peanut protein extracts.
“This process proves
that pulsed light can inactivate the peanut allergenic proteins and indicates
that pulsed light has a great potential in peanut allergen mitigation,” Yang
said.
About 1.9 million
people, or 0.6 percent of U.S. residents, are allergic to peanuts, according to
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National
Institutes of Health.
Reactions can range
from skin rashes to anaphylaxis, which can be fatal. Currently, the best way
for those allergic to peanuts to stay safe is to avoid them, according to the
NIH. Many people carry epinephrine injectors that help offset their allergy
symptoms until they reach a hospital.
In the latest study,
Yang and his colleagues applied the pulsed ultraviolet light technology to
whole peanuts. That makes the findings more useful, because peanut processing
usually starts from whole-peanut roasting, and roasted peanuts are then
packaged to sell as whole peanuts or made into peanut butter, he said.
“The latest study
moves one step closer to the actual production,” Yang said.
For the study, Yang
used a pulsating light system – two lamps filled with xenon, two cooling
blowers, one treatment chamber with a conveyor belt and a control module ─ to
direct concentrated bursts of light to modify the peanut allergenic proteins.
That way, human antibodies can’t recognize them as allergens and begin to
release histamines.
Histamines create
allergy symptoms such as itching, rashes and wheezing. The pulsing light
reduced the allergenic potential of the major peanut proteins Ara h1-h3.
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