FDA Approves First Medication to Help Reduce Allergic Reactions to Multiple Foods After Accidental Exposure
What is the advantage of this over an epi pen? The article doesn’t really say.
There’s an NPR article Here
The TL;DR is
The medication is not intended for use during an allergic reaction. Instead, it is designed to be taken repeatedly every few weeks to help reduce the risk of reactions over time. The FDA said people taking the drug should continue to avoid foods they are allergic to.
So it seems to be along the lines of the pre exposure desensitization regimens.
It’s been available for a while for treatment of allergic asthma and nasal polyps. It’s a monoclonal antibody that binds with free Immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies that are responsible for directing allergic reactions.
From the article
Xolair is intended for repeated use to reduce the risk of allergic reactions and is not approved for the immediate emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis.
Epi Pens are for immediate emergency response for allergic reactions, they aren’t preventative in any way.
Epi Pens are basically just a shot of adrenaline, they don’t actually act directly on your immune system at all, it’s basically just sends an override message to your body to forget about whatever else it’s doing and focus on opening up your airways, pumping blood, or whatever else you might need in order to, for example, run from a lion.
Which buys you some time, but you’re still probably going to need some treatment or monitoring once the adrenaline wears off, and you’re probably going to feel like shit afterwards, and epinephrine isn’t without it’s own pretty significant risks and side effects.
Xolair is intended for repeated use to reduce the risk of allergic reactions and is not approved for the immediate emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis.
Glad they’re working on stuff like this, but it seems generally less effective than I’ve heard OIT is supposed to be, but I wonder if there’s any combination that is more effective or safe.
Yeah OIT will slowly “train” your immune system to not react to increasing amounts of an allergen. This is literally a monoclonal antibody that binds to free IgE antibodies so that there will be fewer of them around if you’re exposed to an allergen.
It seems much more well suited for its originally approved uses of allergic asthma and nasal polyps (which are caused by recurrent allergic inflammatory processes involved in sinusitis/rhinitis) than it would be for food allergies.
