IgE-mediated peanut allergy: Current and novel predictive biomarkers for clinical phenotypes using multi-omics approaches

Abstract

Food allergy is a collective term for several immune-mediated responses to food. IgE-mediated food allergy is the best-known subtype. The patients present with a marked diversity of clinical profiles including symptomatic manifestations, threshold reactivity and reaction kinetics. In-vitro predictors of these clinical phenotypes are evasive and considered as knowledge gaps in food allergy diagnosis and risk management. Peanut allergy is a relevant disease model where pioneer discoveries were made in diagnosis, immunotherapy and prevention. This review provides an overview on the immune basis for phenotype variations in peanut-allergic individuals, in the light of future patient stratification along emerging omic-areas. Beyond specific IgE-signatures and basophil reactivity profiles with established correlation to clinical outcome, allergenomics, mass spectrometric resolution of peripheral allergen tracing, might be a fundamental approach to understand disease pathophysiology underlying biomarker discovery. Deep immune phenotyping is thought to reveal differential cell responses but also, gene expression and gene methylation profiles (eg, peanut severity genes) are promising areas for biomarker research. Finally, the study of microbiome-host interactions with a focus on the immune system modulation might hold the key to understand tissue-specific responses and symptoms. The immune mechanism underlying acute food-allergic events remains elusive until today. Deciphering this immunological response shall enable to identify novel biomarker for stratification of patients into reaction endotypes. The availability of powerful multi-omics technologies, together with integrated data analysis, network-based approaches and unbiased machine learning holds out the prospect of providing clinically useful biomarkers or biomarker signatures being predictive for reaction phenotypes.