The following is an excerpt of an article by Roxanne Khamsi in the New York Times about researchers developing a GMO peanut that is less allergenic than a conventional peanut.
Allergic reactions to peanuts cause around 500 hospitalizations and even some deaths in the United States each year. Food that contains trace amounts, because it was produced with factory equipment or kitchen tools that came into contact with peanuts, can prove fatal for allergic individuals who consume it unsuspectingly. Accidentally ingesting as little as a third of a single peanut — about 70 milligrams — can send someone to the emergency room, and some people may react to only 1 milligram, says [Wesley] Burks, who is now a leading allergy researcher.
For a long time, the only way to address peanut allergies involved creating peanut-free spaces in schools and on planes, changing individual behaviors or ensuring the availability of emergency medical treatments like the controversially high-priced EpiPen. Doctors have tried feeding patients minuscule amounts of peanuts to gradually retrain their immune systems to become tolerant of the food, but the treatment doesn’t always work. Now a growing number of researchers from separate fields are converging on an entirely different approach. Rather than changing people, they say, we should change the peanut.
Twice a month, inside a nearly windowless former school-cafeteria kitchen on the outskirts of Greensboro, N.C., scientists working at a food-technology start-up, Alrgn Bio, pour several pounds of roasted peanuts into a steaming eight-quart stainless-steel tank. The peanuts swirl in the humming tank for several hours in a warm bath of water mixed with a commercially produced enzyme called Alcalase. In the years since Burks’s first discovery, researchers have identified 16 other peanut proteins that are allergenic. Alcalase works within the peanuts to destroy the biologically reactive parts of these types of proteins to varying degrees while leaving the peanuts’ natural form intact. The hope is that the proteins are so changed that they won’t be recognized by the immune system — and will be less likely to elicit an allergic reaction, or at least a deadly one — in someone with the allergy.
The peanut-cleansing method used by Alrgn Bio evolved from experiments dating back to 2005, when biochemists at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro started mixing peanut extracts with trypsin, an enzyme found in the human intestine, to see whether the enzyme could break down the proteins that Burks and others discovered were causing allergies. The university researchers later turned to Alcalase, an enzyme that can break down an even broader range of proteins and that is used in some foods like marinades. (It’s also found in laundry detergent, where it chews up stains from protein-rich foods like eggs and gravy.) The Alcalase-treatment process now yields peanuts that look similar to those sold at the supermarket, aside from being a slightly darker shade. For the most part, the samples I tried tasted like ordinary nuts, though perhaps missing some of their earthy complexity. Alrgn Bio is still refining the process of altering its peanuts, which are currently called Safer Peanuts, to retain all their natural flavor.
To read the entire article, please visit the New York Times.