In May, The Natasha Allergy Research Foundation announced their first Natasha Clinical Trial. The trial will focus on children and young people with milk and peanut allergies in our new ground-breaking £2.2m oral immunotherapy trial.

The trial will aim to plug the current Oral Immunotherapy (OIT) research gap by proving that everyday foods instead of expensive pharmaceutical drugs can be used as a practical treatment for food allergy. If it’s successful, it will empower the NHS to provide cost-effective treatments and the more cost-effective they are, the greater the potential to treat more people across the country.

The study will recruit 216 people between the ages of 3 and 23 years. Following an initial 12 months of desensitisation (carried out according to a standardised protocol under strict medical supervision), participants will be monitored for a further 2 years in order to report on longer-term safety and cost-effectiveness. The aim is to bring the level of evidence to a point where OIT using commercially-available foods could be approved for use in the NHS to treat food-allergic patients most at risk of anaphylaxis.

The trial will which will take 3 years to complete, over 5 universities from North to South across the UK and at a cost of £2.2M. It has been funded thanks to a consortium of food businesses’ generous donations and from Natasha’s Army group of supporters.

Initially the trial will focus on milk and peanut allergy, but in the future the aim is for OIT to extend to treating any food allergy, not just allergens named in the EU top 14.

Since their daughter Natasha’s tragic death from an allergic reaction to sesame, Nadim and Tanya Ednan-Laperouse have been determined that her death would not be in vain. They believe that medical research holds the key to changing allergic lives and this is a huge mission for their charity. For too long, people with allergies have been told to take all responsibility to remain safe; to ensure 100% avoidance to the foods they are allergic to. They need and deserve so much more.

For more information, click here.