Description

Food immunotherapy, especially oral immunotherapy (OIT), is now a standard treatment option for patients allergic to cow´s milk, hen´s egg or peanuts. While peanut OIT has drawn considerable attention from the scientific community, milk and hen´s egg OIT still remain as the most common immunotherapy administered in daily routine. Optimization of these treatments is a priority to offer to a wider number of candidates a more efficient and safe way of treatment.

A Phase II/III randomized clinical trial enrolling a total of 40 patients with non-severe food allergies (20 cow's milk allergic children and 20 hen's egg allergic children) to assess the safety and efficacy of a rush/rapid versus a conventional OIT protocol.

Schemes are comparable in terms of the number of doses, the relative increment between doses and the final amount of protein, with one exception: the "rush" regimen includes several doses given the same day over the first week of treatment while in the "conventional" regimen Induction Phase is based upon single doses given every 2 weeks.

There are two different parts in the study, during Induction Phase (Part 1, 1 week up to 7 months), participants in both groups will receive incremental doses of milk/egg, depending on their allergy, until they tolerate 6600 mg or 4680mg of milk or egg protein respectively. The occurrence of adverse events in both groups will result in dose adjustments and delay in completion Induction Phase. During Maintenance Phase (Part 2), patients will ingest the same dose (daily for milk and every 48h for egg) until the end of study, that will last for a total duration of 7 months.

The study features a dual primary outcome. Safety and efficacy variables are primary outcomes, and parents and patient-reported food allergy-related quality of life (HRQoL) are secondary outcomes, as well as burden of treatment and immunological changes. Molecular changes underlying OIT will be studied, and biomarkers of safety and efficacy will be sought