Biomay Joins EU Project “Food Allergy Specific Immuno - Therapy” / FAST (Oct 2008)

Biomay participates in the EU project “FAST” (Food Allergy Specific Immunotherapy), the kickoff meeting of which was recently held in Madrid. In this multi-national project, 15 European academic, clinical and commercial partners focus on the research and treatment of food allergy, in particular severe allergies to fish and fruit.

FAST will develop a safe treatment approach by replacing food extracts with hypo-allergenic recombinant allergens, the active ingredients of specific immunotherapy. Both severe fish and fruit allergy are caused by single major allergens, parvalbumin for fish and lipid transfer protein for fruit (LTP), thus enabling the development of novel biotech-products. Biomay will contribute intellectual property for a hypoallergenic parvalbumin variant to the collaboration. The two approaches for achieving hypoallergenicity will be site-directed mutagenesis and chemical modification.

“The FAST project interlinks Biomay with the European network of food allergy research,” notes Dr. Angela Neubauer, Technology Manager of Biomay. “It gives us the opportunity to partially commercialize our patents in this field. From the scientific outcome of the project, we expect indication on how to proceed ideally in clinical development of food allergy immunotherapy.”

Biomay will carry out process development and GMP production for the most promising candidates. After pre-clinical testing, phase I/II randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials will be performed. To understand the underlying immune mechanisms, these trials will be accompanied by in-depth serological and cellular immune analyses. FAST  targets to improve the quality of life of food allergic patients by developing a safe and effective curative treatment.

www.allergome.org

(Madrid, October 1, 2008)