Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have been awarded a five-year, $7.2 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to establish a new Asthma and Allergy Disease Collaborative Research Center focused on advancing personalized treatment strategies for peanut allergy.
The study, known as Immunological Trajectories of Peanut Desensitization (INROADS), will investigate the biological mechanisms that cause desensitization in peanut allergies and identify biomarkers that can help predict which patients are most likely to benefit from treatment. This effort brings together experts in allergy, immunology, omics, artificial intelligence, computational biology, and clinical research from across Mount Sinai to advance precision medicine approaches for food allergy care.
In some areas of the United States, peanut allergies affect approximately 2 percent of adults and up to 5 percent of children. Its prevalence has tripled in recent decades, making it one of the most common and potentially life-threatening food allergies. Although recently approved treatments (such as peanut oral immunotherapy and the allergy drug omalizumab) have improved treatment options, clinicians currently have no reliable way to predict treatment response or understand why treatments are effective for some patients and not others.
Mount Sinai has played a leading role in developing and advancing treatments that are transforming the care of peanut allergy patients. This new center will allow us to take the next important step toward precision medicine by identifying the immune and molecular pathways that determine treatment success. Our goal is to help all patients receive the treatment most likely to benefit them. ”
Spinda Bunyavanich, MD, MPH, MPhil, Contact INROADS Principal Investigator and Deputy Director, Elliott and Roslyn Jaffe Food Allergy Research Institute, Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital
Dr. Bunyavanich is the Mount Sinai Professor of Allergy and Systems Biology and Professor of Pediatrics and Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The INROADS Center builds on decades of pioneering peanut allergy research at Mount Sinai, including work that contributed to Food and Drug Administration approval of peanut oral immunotherapy and omalizumab. Recently, by carefully characterizing peanut allergy susceptibility, researchers have demonstrated that many patients can be safely and effectively desensitized using moderate doses of commercially available peanut products. These findings may help expand access to treatment and challenge long-held assumptions about the management of peanut allergy.
“Families living with peanut allergy are in constant fear and vigilance,” said Scott H. Sicheler, MD, multiple principal investigator of INROADS, director of the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute, and chair of the Selina Liu and John Liu Division of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “The discoveries made through this center have the potential to fundamentally improve the way desensitization therapy is delivered, making it more personalized, more effective, and ultimately more accessible to patients and families.”
The center includes two major research projects.
- micro truckThis study uses advanced immune profiling techniques, allergen-specific T cell studies, and laboratory models to identify biological markers that predict treatment response and reveal mechanisms of immune regulation during desensitization.
- spade, It applies transcriptomics and machine learning approaches to uncover molecular signatures associated with successful desensitization and develop predictive tools that may help guide clinical decision-making.
Supporting these projects are three integration cores:
- Pathway Clinical Coreprovides clinical data and biological samples from patients undergoing oral food tolerance testing before and after desensitization therapy.
- management corecoordinates scientific activities, center operations, and collaboration across the national Asthma and Allergy Disease Collaborative Research Center network.
- data stewardship coreoverseeing biospecimen management, data integration, and sharing of research resources with the broader scientific community.
By combining detailed clinical information with comprehensive immunological and molecular analyses, researchers aim to create one of the most robust datasets ever collected for peanut allergy desensitization studies. These data will be made publicly available to foster discovery and collaboration across the field.
“Our integrative approach brings together clinical expertise, cutting-edge immunology, omics, artificial intelligence, and computational science to answer some of the most important unanswered questions in food allergy research,” said Dr. Sicheler. “Insights gained from INROADS may not only improve outcomes in peanut allergy, but also help treat other food allergies and allergic diseases.”
Faculty members participating in the center include Dr. Eric Wambre; Julie Wang, MD. Dr. Wang Pei; Dr. Christine Beaumont. Dr. Seung-hee Kim Schultz heads the departments of pediatrics, genetics and genomics, immunology and immunotherapy, and related research programs at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The INROADS Center receives funding from NI AID through the Asthma and Allergic Diseases Cooperative Research Center Program.
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