Over the last 50 years, allergies have become a major health issue affecting approximately 20% of adults and more than 30% of children in developed countries. Allergies impair the life quality of affected individuals and diagnosis/treatment is costly for health care systems. In the EU, the avoidable indirect costs of patients insufficiently treated for allergy is estimated to range between 55 and 151 billion Euro per year. A key issue towards fighting this allergy epidemic lies in the diagnosis of allergies, which is still limited by expensive, low throughput methods allowing to test only a few dozens of allergens at once. Yet, several thousands of allergens have been reported in the literature and cost effective methods for testing hundreds or even thousands of allergens are highly sought after.
In this project, we devised a novel high throughput method that allowed us to test over 5000 different protein allergens in parallel within a single experiment. Instead of cumbersomely purifying protein allergens from natural sources, we produced synthetic DNA libraries using expression systems commonly applied in biotechnology. Our method greatly expanded the throughput of allergen testing compared to state of the art methods and allowed for the first time to systematically test all known protein allergens at a fraction of today’s cost and within a single assay. Within this project, we successfully designed and produced the library, established its validity, and successfully applied it to pre-existing samples that we had for 1000 individuals. These data and results provide strong marketing material for the technology which we are in the process of discussions with interested parties as diagnostic kits to hospitals and analytic laboratories. We are also considering marketing this technology directly to individuals as another business strategy. and are considering in that sense launching a spin-off laboratory that will directly perform these tests.
