GROUP INFORMATION

The main research programmes underway are: oral immunotherapy with various foods, study of the epidemiological and component diagnosis of nut allergy, descriptive study of immune phenotypes in food allergy, study of penicillin allergy in children under 14 years old and study of different diagnostic procedures for exercise-induced asthma in children.

1. Food allergy:
2. Food immunotherapy:

Our aims in this field include:

• Designing oral immunotherapy protocols for milk, egg and wheat allergy that improve safety, efficacy and time used.
• Determining the long-term efficacy from a clinical and immunological point of view of the food immunotherapy protocols indicated above.
• Developing Spanish National Food Immunotherapy Guidelines along with other institutions and specialists in this field, within the framework of the SEAIC and the SEICAP.
• Completing the “OmaBase” project: "Recording cases in which Omalizumab was used to treat food allergies. Multi-centre recording of food-allergic patient cases (milk, eggs and/or vegetables) treated with Omalizumab as a single treatment or associated with oral immunotherapy (OIT)". This project is in development and is in its final phase of recording cases of patients with any indication of food allergy who are being treated with Omalizumab and monitoring the evolution of their food allergy, regardless of whether there is concomitant use of food immunotherapy or not.
• Oral immunotherapy with fish: This multi-centre project is currently underway, has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the HNJ and the AEMPS and is being supported by SEICAP.

2. Epidemiology of food allergies and food allergens:

• AFRUSEN record: "Record of new cases of nut allergy in children: clinical characteristics and sensitivity profile. Multi-centre study". The main aims are to describe the clinical characteristics and sensitivity patterns (molecular diagnosis) of new diagnoses of allergy to the nuts most commonly eaten in Spain and to stratify them according to the different regions.
• OVALE clinical trial: "Description of immune phenotypes in immunological recognition by microarray assay in allergy to egg proteins in infants. This multi-centre project addresses the monitoring of a cohort of newly diagnosed egg-allergic patients and the description of the different clinical and immunological profiles according to their evolution.

2. Asthma:

• Bronchial Hyperresponse: Based on previous work, our goal is to develop a position statement on the diagnosis of exercise-induced asthma in children, based on expert consensus.

3. Allergy to medication:

• APENIN study: "Study of penicillin allergy in infancy". This national multi-centre study aims to evaluate the efficiency of diagnostics tools for penicillin allergy in a paediatric population in a real-life context, in different Spanish allergy departments. In the second phase we plan to develop a diagnostic procedure algorithm for children aged under 14 years.