Randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial of sublingual immunotherapy in children with house dust mite allergy in primary care: study design and recruitment

Background. For respiratory allergic disorders in children, sublingual immunotherapy has been developed as an alternative to subcutaneous immunotherapy. Sublingual immunotherapy is more convenient, has a good safety profile and might be an attractive option for use in primary care. A randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study was designed to establish the ef

EAACI Guidelines on Allergen Immunotherapy:Executive Statement

The allergist's community has recently celebrated 100 year of Allergen Immunotherapy (AIT). Unfortunately the implemention of this treatment is still impaired by some challenges. With the diversity of definitions, methodology and different allergen products used, research studies have produced conflicting outcomes. This has resulted in confusion about the benefits and risks of AIT amongst policymakers and professionals, as well as in the variable availability of AIT products, regulation and reimbursement policies globally. In 2015 EAACI initiated the AIT Guidelines project as part of the Presidential plan in order to settle the controversies. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserve

Identification of emulsifier potato peptides by bioinformatics: application to omega-3 delivery emulsions and release from potato industry side streams

We are grateful for the financial support from Innovation Fund Denmark (Grant nr: 7045-00021B, PROVIDE project). We also acknowledge K.M.C. amba (Brande, Denmark) and A.K.V. amba (Langholt, Denmark) for providing the potato samples used in this study.In this work, we developed a novel approach combining bioinformatics, testing of functionality and bottom-up proteomics to obtain peptide emulsifiers from potato side-streams. This is a significant advancement in the process to obtain emulsifier peptides and it is applicable to any type of protein. Our results indicated that structure at the interface is the major determining factor of the emulsifying activity of peptide emulsifiers. Fish oil-in-water emulsions with high physical stability were stabilized with peptides to be predicted to have facial amphiphilicity: (i) peptides with predominantly α-helix conformation at the interface and having 18–29 amino acids, and (ii) peptides with predominantly β-strand conformation at the interface and having 13–15 amino acids. In addition, high physically stable emulsions were obtained with peptides that were predicted to have axial hydrophobic/hydrophilic regions. Peptides containing the sequence FCLKVGV showed high in vitro antioxidant activity and led to emulsions with high oxidative stability. Peptide-level proteomics data and sequence analysis revealed the feasibility to obtain the potent emulsifier peptides found in this study (e.g. γ-1) by trypsin-based hydrolysis of different side streams in the potato industry.Innovation Fund Denmark 7045-00021

First Dark Matter Search Results from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment

The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment is a dark matter detector centered on a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber operating at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, USA. This Letter reports results from LZ's first search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with an exposure of 60 live days using a fiducial mass of 5.5 t. A profile-likelihood ratio analysis shows the data to be consistent with a background-only hypothesis, setting new limits on spin-independent WIMP-nucleon, spin-dependent WIMP-neutron, and spin-dependent WIMP-proton cross-sections for WIMP masses above 9 GeV/c$^2$. The most stringent limit is set at 30 GeV/c$^2$, excluding cross sections above 5.9$\times 10^{-48}$ cm$^2$ at the 90\% confidence level.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. See https://tinyurl.com/LZDataReleaseRun1 for a data release related to this pape

2019 ARIA Care pathways for allergen immunotherapy

Allergen immunotherapy (AIT) is a proven therapeutic option for the treatment of allergic rhinitis and/or asthma. Many guidelines or national practice guidelines have been produced but the evidence-based method varies, many are complex and none propose care pathways. This paper reviews care pathways for AIT using strict criteria and provides simple recommendations that can be used by all stakeholders including healthcare professionals. The decision to prescribe AIT for the patient should be individualized and based on the relevance of the allergens, the persistence of symptoms despite appropriate medications according to guidelines as well as the availability of good-quality and efficacious extracts. Allergen extracts cannot be regarded as generics. Immunotherapy is selected by specialists for stratified patients. There are no currently available validated biomarkers that can predict AIT success. In adolescents and adults, AIT should be reserved for patients with moderate/severe rhinitis or for those with moderate asthma who, despite appropriate pharmacotherapy and adherence, continue to exhibit exacerbations that appear to be related to allergen exposure, except in some specific cases. Immunotherapy may be even more advantageous in patients with multimorbidity. In children, AIT may prevent asthma onset in patients with rhinitis. mHealth tools are promising for the stratification and follow-up of patients.Peer reviewe

The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment

We describe the design and assembly of the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, a direct detection search for cosmic WIMP dark matter particles. The centerpiece of the experiment is a large liquid xenon time projection chamber sensitive to low energy nuclear recoils. Rejection of backgrounds is enhanced by a Xe skin veto detector and by a liquid scintillator Outer Detector loaded with gadolinium for efficient neutron capture and tagging. LZ is located in the Davis Cavern at the 4850' level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, USA. We describe the major subsystems of the experiment and its key design features and requirements

LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Technical Design Report

In this Technical Design Report (TDR) we describe the LZ detector to be built at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). The LZ dark matter experiment is designed to achieve sensitivity to a WIMP-nucleon spin-independent cross section of three times ten to the negative forty-eighth square centimeters