Children's Hospital Colorado

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Research at the Allergy and Immunology Center

What our allergy and immunology research means for kids

Our research aims to be practical, yet cutting edge, while maintaining a focus on helping our patients and their families. We want to help prevent and treat allergies, but also maximize the quality of our patients' and families' lives while they live with food allergy.

"My aim is to use my research to help influence health care policy and advocacy within food allergy."

Dr. David Fleischer, Allergy and Asthma at Children's Hospital Colorado -DAVID FLEISCHER, MD

Ongoing allergy and immunology research

Our food allergy program is an international leader in researching food allergy treatment, food allergy quality of life and best practices for the prevention, diagnosis and management of food allergy. Our team members are also active in food allergy healthcare policy and regularly serve as authors on practice management guidelines.

We collaborate with the top centers around the world to help research the latest food allergy treatments, which aim to desensitize allergic children so that they can tolerate up to 1 gram (a few kernels) of peanut, about the size of an accidental bite of something. This transformative research is part of an FDA fast-tracked effort to accelerate the development and approval of new food allergy therapies.

Our groundbreaking drug allergy program seeks to understand the most efficient way to diagnose drug allergy. With a focus on penicillin allergy, our team is investigating which children are low-risk and unlikely to benefit from penicillin allergy testing.

We conduct investigator-initiated and federal grant-funded studies, as well as donor and other sponsor-funded clinical trials for investigational treatments. We have a variety of ongoing allergy research studies including:

  • Epicutaneous immunotherapy for the treatment of milk allergy
  • Determining tradeoffs among health benefits, adverse events and resource use associated with food allergy treatment
  • Understanding the outcomes of oral food challenges
  • Understanding the effects of oral food challenges on food allergy quality of life
  • Understanding maternal and early life influences, particularly nutritional factors, on the development of allergic diseases

Our allergy and immunology pediatric specialists are international leaders in allergy research, especially in food allergy. Through our partnership with the University of Colorado School of Medicine, we provide professional education and knowledge advancement through research.

Allergy and Immunology advancements

Our specialists are on the forefront of evaluating new methods of preventing, diagnosing, managing and treating allergic diseases. Our researchers work to understand risk factors for developing allergic and inflammatory reactions, and then seek new ways to safely regulate those responses.

  • David Fleischer, MD, was the lead international investigator for the DBV Technologies PEPITES Epicutaneous Immunotherapy peanut patch trial. This is a groundbreaking study of a non-oral treatment for peanut allergy that was shown to successfully desensitize 4 to 11-year-old children with peanut allergies through their skin.
  • Carina Venter, PhD, is an internationally recognized allergy dietitian. She continues to serve as a lead investigator on the longstanding Food Allergy and Intolerance research birth cohort study, which has led to the understanding of how allergic diseases evolve throughout childhood.
  • Matthew Greenhawt, MD, works with hospitals across the nation and in Australia to explore the cost-effectiveness of early feeding policies and anaphylaxis management policies to maximize the health benefits of procedures and minimize their costs.
  • Our investigators have been leading experts in helping to author new policies to help introduce potentially allergenic solids within the first year of life to help reduce the risk of developing food allergy. Our pediatric allergy experts co-authored the 2017 NIAID Addendum Guidelines on Preventing Peanut Allergy and continue to investigate the health, nutritional and economic benefits related to early introduction.