Consensus allergens: a fresh approach to food allergy vaccination
Big strides have been made in food allergy treatments over the last few years – but current ‘microdosing’ methods are not ideal. They are slow, specific to a single foodstuff, and expose patients to the allergen itself, resulting in many patients dropping out before finishing their course of treatment. Now, Associate Professor Esperanza Rivera de Torre and Professor Andreas Hougaard Laustsen-Kiel of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) are pioneering a fresh approach. It uses synthetic ‘consensus allergens’ as the basis for mRNA vaccines that can offer wide protection against whole families of food allergies.
A new Lundbeck Foundation Frontier Grant, worth DKK 5 million (EUR 670,000) over 18 months will help Associate Professor Esperanza Rivera de Torre and her team’s highly original concept so it is ready to be tested in humans and viable for commercial development. Photo: Jeppe Carlsen, Ingenøren
By Stephen Adams
Being bitten by a highly venomous snake and having to avoid peaches, apples, or celery for fear of triggering an allergic reaction are two very different experiences. But scientists at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) are using the knowledge they have gained working on broad-spectrum snake bite antidotes to develop a new generation of vaccines, each potentially capable of providing protection against a whole family of food allergies.
The idea is to transform the field of food allergy vaccination by making it simpler, faster and safer than it is today.
A growing need for better treatments
Around one in 20 people globally suffer from food allergy; the proportion is even higher in children. Incidence is growing. And up to half of people with food allergy are polysensitised, meaning they react to multiple food stuffs – known as having a ‘cross-reactive’ allergic response.
“With the consensus allergen, we enable broad-spectrum coverage – which is something no currently approved treatment can do. So we can treat multiple food allergies with one treatment. It’s like having ‘one vaccine to rule them all’.
Living with food allergy can be difficult and while preventative treatments have certainly improved recently, there is much room for improvement, according to Esperanza Rivera de Torre, Associate Professor in DTU’s Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine.
“Today, the main approach to food allergy is avoidance, which is extremely difficult to do, especially with children, making it a source of great anxiety,” she said.
The only potentially curative solution available right now is allergy immunotherapy, which involves ‘microdosing’ the patient with incrementally larger doses of the allergen itself over a long period of time, she further explained.
“But allergy immunotherapy has three problems. One: it’s very specific. For every allergy, you need one course of treatment. So if you have several food allergies, you need several courses of treatment. Two: it’s a very long treatment, up to five years of weekly and then monthly exposure. And three: microdosing still involves exposing the patient to the allergen itself, which can cause allergic reactions. As a result, there is a drop-out rate of up to 80%,” she said.
One vaccine for multiple allergies
Rivera de Torre’s idea is a vaccine that gets over these problems by utilising a synthetic ‘consensus allergen’ protein that can help desensitise the immune system to a range of related foods. Then, instead of exposing patients to that protein itself, they would be injected with the mRNA instructions for them to make it inside their cells.
She explained: “With the consensus allergen, we enable broad-spectrum coverage – which is something no currently approved treatment can do. So we can treat multiple food allergies with one treatment. It’s like having ‘one vaccine to rule them all’.
Frontier Grants facilitate transitions from basic research to attractive prospects for biotech investors
“And by using mRNA to encode the instructions for cells to make the relevant consensus allergen protein, we cover the two other problems.”
She said the mRNA acted like ‘a Trojan horse’, with the patient’s body only being exposed to the consensus allergen once this protein had been made inside their cells. Because there was no injected protein ‘freely floating’ outside of cells, “we can expect patients won’t have an allergic reaction to our vaccine”, she explained. This Trojan horse approach should therefore enable them to give a higher effective dose, she said.
The goal is to achieve desensitisation – meaning the recipient no longer suffers an allergic reaction when exposed to the food stuff – after the administration of three doses over a three-month period. They also want recipients to experience fewer and less serious adverse reactions, compared to existing allergy immunotherapies.
Targeting the shapes allergies share
Foundational to the group’s approach is the fact that the immune system recognises similar molecular shapes, or ‘scaffolds’, that are often shared by numerous related species, having inherited them from a common ancestor.
This means an individual can develop a range of allergies to eating foods as diverse as peaches, apples, hazelnuts, almonds, and lettuce (among many others) which all have similarly shaped ‘lipid transfer proteins’ (LTPs). Such LTPs are also present in the pollen of cypress trees.
Although debated, it is thought inhalation of cypress pollen in childhood triggers allergy to the tree’s LTPs, which then results in cross-reactive allergy to foodstuffs such as those above. So-called “cypress-peach” allergy is very common in Mediterranean countries.
Rivera de Torre explained: “These LTPs are part of the molecular machinery of plants, that carry out essential functions. In biology, molecular shape is intrinsically linked to function. We’ve found that what appear to be relatively distantly-related plants actually have LTPs which have a very similar shape – and it is this shape that the immune systems of people with cypress-peach syndrome are over-reacting to.”
Using LTPs from these foods and pollens as a reference, Rivera de Torre and her team have engineered a single, synthetic consensus allergen which is well-matched to them in terms of molecular shape.
They have already shown in mouse models that a vaccine containing mRNA instructions for this LTP-based consensus allergen can offer a degree of protection against a variety of related food allergies. Results of the study were published in Nature Communications in February 2026.
Preparing for human testing
Now, Rivera de Torre has received a Frontier Grant from the Lundbeck Foundation to advance their work further – to refine the vaccine and dosing regimen to elicit a more powerful response, and to test this new formulation in mice so it is ready for first-in-human studies.
In parallel, they will progress a second vaccine to help protect people who suffer from another cross-reactive allergy, known as birch-apple syndrome, which is common in northern European countries. Here, and again due to molecular-scale structural similarities, it is believed early exposure to birch pollen triggers food allergies to apples, celery, and other fruit and vegetables. In this case, the team’s consensus allergen is based on another shared protein class found in these foodstuffs.
The DTU team will work in collaboration with Dr Juan Luis Paris at the Biomedical Research Institute of Malaga, Spain, who is an internationally recognised expert on allergy models.
The snakebite connection
But how did DTU’s earlier research in a very different field, snake bite antivenoms, lead to these experimental food allergy vaccines?
Professor Andreas Hougaard Laustsen-Kiel, who leads the snakebite work, explained:
“Fundamentally, the science is quite similar. Back in 2018 we thought: ‘What if we could make a recombinant antivenom that can broadly neutralise snake toxins across species based on the structural similarities shared by many toxins?
We looked to create a single antivenom that could protect against bites from 18 different African species of mamba, cobra and rinkhals, which are all members of the Elapidae family of snakes.”
In many parts of the world, snakebites are a significant cause of death and morbidity. It’s an under-appreciated problem. Across sub-Saharan Africa, they cause at least 7,000 deaths a year and necessitate 10,000 amputations – although these numbers are probably gross underestimates, Laustsen-Kiel further explained.
“At the moment, if someone’s bitten by one of these snakes, they need to be given the specific antivenom that covers that particular species. But what if the victim doesn’t know exactly what bit them? Or what if the local medical centre doesn’t have that particular antivenom in stock?” he continued.
Using a process called phage display, which involved giving an alpaca and a llama tiny doses of venoms from the 18 snake species to provoke their immune systems into producing defensive antibody fragments known as nanobodies, Laustsen-Kiel’s team were able to identify eight high affinity, broadly neutralising nanobodies.
They used this engineered ‘nanobody cocktail’ as the basis of a recombinant antivenom which, when tested in mice, protected the rodents from the venom of 17 of the 18 snake species.
The team’s efforts made the cover of Nature last November. They are pursuing similar broad-spectrum antivenoms for American coral snakes and Indian cobras and king cobras.
The food allergy project was an inspirational off-shoot of this antivenom work, Laustsen-Kiel explained.
“We have this initiative called Invention Club, where each member comes up with an idea for how we might commercialise something we’re working on,” he said.
“This was during Covid, and I asked Esperanza if there was a smart way of pairing our consensus protein design work with mRNA technology. And a little while later she came up with this fantastic concept of using the two to create broad-spectrum food allergy vaccines.”
Towards commercial development
DTU’s Tech Transfer Office has filed several international Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) patent applications regarding the snake antivenom project and, separately, a patent application for the food allergen immunotherapy project.
DTU intends to grant an exclusive licence agreement with a spin-out that Rivera de Torre and Laustsen-Kiel are setting up, called ‘Immunite’.
Rivera de Torre and Laustsen-Kiel first approached the Frontier Grants team with their idea for broad-spectrum vaccines based on consensus allergens back in 2023.
Paul Kristjansen, Senior Scientific Director of Frontier Grants, said: “We thought it was an impressive concept, with a lot of potential.
“But at that stage their empirical data package was not yet mature enough, particularly regarding potential concerns about exposing severely allergic individuals to the technology.”
Laustsen-Kiel said: “We had constructive discussions and they made some valid points – such as the fact that we hadn’t yet tested the concept in allergic mice, only normal mice.
“So, we went away, did the necessary work and generated some good data, which ended up published in the Nature Communications paper this February.
“After our initial discussions we kept in touch and made sure the Frontier Grants team was always aware of developments. And earlier this year they gave us the green light for the award, which we are obviously delighted about.”
“The team – Paul, Nanna Junker, Lars Gredsted, and Jan-Erik Messling – has been very supportive throughout, and their advice has been really useful in focusing the project and getting it to the point where it was ready for the award.”
“So, if I have one bit of advice for those thinking of applying, it would be, ‘Get in touch with the Frontier Grants team early.’ They really are there to help.”
