Cincinnati Children’s receives NIH grant to become CoFAR clinical research center

Key takeaways:

• Cincinnati Children’s was selected by NIH to become a CoFAR center.
• The NIH grant will dispense funds for 7 years.
• Cincinnati Children’s focuses on the mechanisms of allergy response.

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center has been selected as a recipient of an NIH grant to join the Consortium of Food Allergy Research as a clinical research center.

The grant is awarded for 7 years and, according to a Cincinnati Children’s press release, will amount to $380,000 each year plus additional funding for clinical trials.

Healio spoke with Amal H. Assa’ad, MD, the associate director of the division of allergy and immunology as well as the director of the food allergy center at Cincinnati Children’s, about what it means to be selected as a Consortium of Food Allergy Research (CoFAR) center.

“Each cycle of CoFAR has produced amazing results that benefited patients and moved the field forward,” Assa’ad said. “That’s what we hope to do with this one.”

In order to be selected for the grant, the hospital had to submit an application to become a CoFAR center and show some of the center-specific research that would be conducted with the help of the funds.

One of the planned studies will look at the impact of a person’s environment and pollution levels on the mechanism that may affect food allergies and eosinophilic disorders. This study will be spearheaded by Nurit Azouz, PhD, assistant professor in the department of pediatrics at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Cincinnati Children’s.

“The most important part of all of this — [and] for the NIH in particular — is always the mechanism for looking at some basic research in our institution that could be done in other centers as well to unravel why things work or why they might not work,” Assa’ad said.

Another area of research that the hospital will be focusing on is oral immunotherapy to stave off allergic reactions.

“The clinical trial we proposed was a trial to look at patients who are undergoing what’s called now OIT, or oral immunotherapy, and these patients get desensitized to food allergens,” Assa’ad said. “But then, we don’t have a standard way to keep them desensitized other than saying you have to keep eating this food in these doses for the rest of your life. So, the proposal that we suggested was to look at alternate scheduling and how that affects the status of tolerance.”

Just earlier this year, another CoFAR-sponsored study conducted at 10 different locations led to FDA approval for omalizumab (Xolair; Genentech, Novartis) for the reduction of reactions in food allergies.

Assa’ad told Healio that being selected for the grant not only will further their research efforts but also impact their patients and staff.

“Our local patients benefit because they get to try new things before they come on market,” Assa’ad said. “Our researchers also benefit because they can have samples from these patients to do the mechanistic studies, and NIH benefits because we can do this for them.”

Cincinnati Children’s is set to begin clinical trials in the spring of 2025.