February 8, 2022, 14:00 CET

Allergy vaccination – a concept to revolutionize allergen immunotherapy

Prof. Matthias Kramer

Dr. Anke Grässel

Allergy Therapeutics plc

Bencard Allergie GmbH

Online Seminar via Zoom

Link and Password upon request!
Please write an e-mail to: iem-seminar.umweltmedizin@tum.de

Allergen immunotherapy (AIT) - the only causal treatment against IgE-mediated allergies - is understood being a process of desensitization by repeated administration of the eliciting allergen. However, our philosophy is that AIT is in fact a therapeutic active vaccination - with the challenge of the patient being allergic to the vaccine itself. This view allows to adopt concepts from prophylactic vaccination into our field and to revolutionize allergy vaccination.
As so often in medicine, our philosophy was textbook knowledge back at those days when allergen immunotherapy was first described: In 1903 William Dunbar introduced AIT as a passive vaccination using equine hyperimmune serum to treat allergic patients. 1911 Noon and Freeman transferred this concept to an active vaccination by administering grass extracts to allergic individuals. Interestingly, allergens were considered to be toxins at that time. Thus, although AIT started historically as a vaccination against toxins this view was lost over the decades and the general understanding shifted towards tolerance induction and desensitization resulting in long treatment courses of 3+ years.
The merits of protective immunity hence introducing vaccine concepts into the allergy field are obvious. In fact, allergy vaccination appears to be the most rational and promising way to significantly improve this treatment. In our presentation, we aim to build a bridge form early vaccine concepts introduced into our field – such as modification of allergens, introduction of adjuvants and adjuvant systems - onto revolutionary concepts like Virus-Like-Particles (VLP) and immune resilience.
We will emphasize on bio-degradable adjuvants attractive for AIT but also prophylactic vaccination, present preclinical data of our first VLP-based vaccine targeting peanut allergy (going into phase I in the US in 2022), and explain the concept of immune resilience – an allergen non-specific phenomenon harnessing the huge potentials of the innate immune system. The idea of immune resilience was born around research about the well-known protective farm effect for atopy. This concept was translated into a lozenge being available as a food for special medical purpose and supported by a huge battery of preclinical data but also human dbpc proof-of-concept trials.