Pioneers hoping to crack peanut allergies for good

Peanut allergies could, in a matter of years, be a thing of the past — or more accurately the offending nut might be about to be cracked — if a Canadian start-up has its way.

Aranex Biotech, founded by chief executive Chloe Gui and chief technology partner Terry Huang, has taken a novel approach to tackling peanut allergies which puts the peanut in the spotlight as opposed to the millions of sufferers across the globe.

“We’re developing hypoallergenic peanuts,” explained Ms Gui. “Most people are looking at drugs for the patient and ways to change the patient… but what we’re actually doing is turning off the genes that code the three major allergens.

“We knew we weren’t going to be able to produce a plant that was hypoallergenic in three months just because of the life cycle of plants and the process it takes to do that so we came up with a way to evaluate whether or not gene editing events occurred in leaf cells.

“If you can turn off the gene in a leaf then you can turn it off in the entire plant. So we were able to show that the technology we’re using works in plant cells.”

Not only does the technology work but Aranex are the first group of scientists ever to prove it. The company is just in its infancy, however, with a seven- to eight-year lead-in period before the finished product is seen.

Regulation on both sides of the Atlantic appears to be on their side though given that their work involves “switching off” genes rather than transplanting them.

“We’re really lucky as well in terms of regulation because gene knockouts aren’t regulated by the US Department of Agriculture so if you were doing a transgenic plant where you put a gene from another species into a peanut plant that would take years of regulatory processes… whereas we’re just removing a gene or turning it off and that’s much, much easier,” Ms Gui said.

With Canadian founders, it’s perhaps no surprise their home nation is among the prospective bases for Aranex now that it’s come to the end of IndieBio but Ireland may well be in with a shout of retaining their expertise if suitable lab space can be found — something that to date has proven difficult.

With the likes of Cork Institute of Technology’s Rubicon Centre a possibility and the 50-acre Hoffman Park science and technology park expressing an interest, Aranex’s groundbreaking research could yet flourish on these shores.