# Detection of Food Allergens in Human Milk

> **NIH NIH R03** · UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER · 2021 · $77,000

## Abstract

The role of maternal diet including or excluding highly allergenic foods in the development of food allergy in
the infants is still unclear. There are no randomized controlled trials assessing maternal food allergen
consumption during pregnancy or lactation on development of allergy to foods, including milk, egg or peanut in
their infants. Retrospective studies, which are subject to recall bias and reverse causality have reported
conflicting findings; so have murine models. The significant limitation to all the studies assessing the impact of
maternal ingestion of peanut during lactation on infant's risk of food allergy is that the presence and the amount
of maternal dietary antigen transmitted to human milk was not assessed. Because published data has
documented variable levels of food antigens in human milk, this seems an apparent variable to control for in
future clinical trials that include or exclude food antigens in mother's diet to assess development of food allergy
in infants. In addition, birth cohort studies that assess development of multiple food allergies would benefit from
a method to allow detection of multiple common food antigens simultaneously from human milk samples. In
addition, a clinical conundrum encountered in daily management of breastfed infants is whether a mother needs
to avoid highly allergenic foods if her infant shows symptoms suggestive of food allergies.
 There is no commercially available, validated assay for detecting food antigens in human milk. The published
data report large variation in peak concentration of peanut and results on kinetics are contradictory. Other
common food allergens, such as cow's milk, hen's egg and wheat are not as well-studied. Therefore, we propose
to develop the assay on a platform that easily allows multiplexing to assess a variety of allergens at once, thereby
providing a broad picture of the nature and kinetics of food exposure through mother's milk, which could be
utilized in future maternal dietary intervention and general cohort studies assessing development of food allergy
in the infant. Furthermore, we propose to verify the biologic functioning of the detected antigen by current gold
standard, basophil activation test (BAT) and to compare levels between mothers with healthy infants and those
with infants with symptoms suggestive of food allergies. Subsequently, this assay could be expanded to other
food antigens and used to characterize the circumstances in which mother's dietary antigens are transmitted in
their milk and should be avoided for the benefit of the infant. This would provide personalized medicine therapies
for breastfed infants suffering from food allergies with significant nutritional and quality of life impact.
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## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10098300
- **Project number:** 5R03AI151965-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
- **Principal Investigator:** Antti Seppo
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $77,000
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-03-01 → 2022-11-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10098300

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10098300, Detection of Food Allergens in Human Milk (5R03AI151965-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10098300. Licensed CC0.

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