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Stanford, Calif. — December 17, 2014—
Allergies, whether they are to food, drugs, the environment, or other triggers, have potentially adverse consequences for millions of people worldwide. Recent estimates conclude that between 30 and 40 percent of the global population suffers from one or more allergic conditions.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist Sean Parker is establishing a new research center at Stanford University School of Medicine in the hope of propelling innovation in allergy research. Today, Mr. Parker announced he has pledged $24 million over the next two years to the medical school to establish the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford University. Mr. Parker’s gift is one of the largest private donations to allergy research in the United States to date.
The first of its kind in the world, the center aims not only to find better treatments for children and adults with allergies, but to go beyond the traditional approach and also to discover underlying immune mechanisms against the disease and develop a lasting cure.
About one in three Americans suffers from some form of allergy, and doctor-diagnosed food allergies affect one in 12 American children under the age of 21 and one in about 50 adults. Of those individuals with a food allergy, approximately 25 percent will have a near-fatal anaphylactic reaction at some point in their lives. It is also estimated that $25 billion is spent each year on reactive food allergy care.
“We need to make catalytic changes in the field of allergy research by studying immune mechanisms in order to apply discoveries in real time to new safer and more durable therapies for adults and children,” said Mr. Parker, whose firsthand experience with life-threatening allergies led him to found the Center to bring better solutions to more people. “I’m excited to partner with Stanford and believe that under the leadership of Dr. Nadeau, the Center will make a transformational impact on how we understand and treat allergies.
The interdisciplinary center aims to transform the lives of patients and families through innovative science and compassionate care. More specifically, the Center will focus on understanding the mechanisms of the immune system, the dysfunctions of which result in allergic reactions. The center will include Stanford specialists in diverse fields including immunology, gastroenterology, otolaryngology, chemistry, bioengineering, pathology, pulmonology, and genetics. Through laboratory and computational research, clinical trials, community outreach, and other efforts, the team will work toward finding rationally-based therapies to provide the safest and best treatments for allergies. Research at the center may have implications for a wide array of immune dysfunctions including asthma, eczema, food allergies, eosinophilic disorders, drug allergies, gastroenterological diseases, and more.
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“We are excited about the center because there is enormous clinical need for better understanding of and treatment for allergies,” said Lloyd Minor, MD, dean of Stanford University School of Medicine. “For instance, the recent profound increase in the incidence of serious food allergy is fascinating and deeply concerning at the same time. Sean Parker’s generous gift will enable Stanford Medicine experts, under Dr. Nadeau’s leadership, to collaborate and innovate across academic disciplines for the benefit of millions of people with allergies.”
“I am thrilled and honored to direct the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford University,” said Dr. Nadeau, associate professor of pediatrics at the medical school and an immunologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and Stanford Health Care. “Sean is well-versed in immunology, and has been a fantastic partner to work with. He’s an entrepreneur and visionary, and we look forward to using this gift and Center as the springboard to improve the lives of those adults and children with allergies through immunotherapy that goes beyond oral therapy.”
In these immunotherapy trials, conducted at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and Stanford Health Care, patients ingest small amounts of the allergen to build tolerance over time. While the treatment has had positive outcomes for a number of adult and pediatric patients, it is a lengthy process that can be dangerous and anxiety-provoking for patients and their families. One of the Center’s priorities is to move beyond oral immunotherapy and identify a better and more lasting cure for allergies.
Mr. Parker's $24 million gift will provide both expendable and endowed support for innovative clinical research and care, state-of-the-art equipment and top-ranked research scientists. Of the $24 million total, $4 million will be used to establish a dollar-for-dollar challenge match for all other new gifts to the center. To learn more about the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford University, or to help support allergy research at Stanford, please visit
med.stanford.edu/allergies
.
(212) 642-7760
[email protected]
Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health:
Jennifer Yuan
(650) 497-8489
[email protected]
The Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford University, established by a $24 million gift from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist Sean Parker, aims to propel innovation in allergy research.
The first of its kind in the world, the new Center’s mission is to find better treatments and ultimately a cure for allergies. The Center will focus on research to better understand the immune system so we can develop customized treatment strategies for patients that are based on individual immune system characteristics. We believe this will have the best chance of having the safest, most durable effect.
The Center will include Stanford specialists in diverse fields including immunology, gastroenterology, otolaryngology, and genetics. Through laboratory and computational research, clinical trials, community outreach and other efforts, the team will work toward finding rationally-based therapies to provide the safest and best treatments for allergies.
Unlike other allergy centers, the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford University is the only coordinated effort that combines basic science and clinical trials with compassionate patient care across all allergies. To date, allergy research has been sporadic and uncoordinated, with centers working in isolation and focusing on either basic science or clinical trials.
By working collaboratively with other researchers in the U.S. and around the world, the Center will create a data-sharing cluster of interlinked satellite centers to run novel and innovative clinical trials in allergy research. In addition, the Center will provide the immune monitoring and share the mechanistic data that can be evaluated along with patient data at the same time. This type of approach has been very effective in cancer immunotherapy and HIV research and treatment. Therefore, we believe applying this approach to allergy research will dramatically accelerate progress in treatments and cures.
Allergies are an immunological problem that should be tackled by immunologists and there is a critical need for funding the basic science around immune mechanisms driving the sensitization and desensitization in allergy. The whole field of allergy research has lagged behind relative to the rest of the field of immunology. They should be one and the same but unfortunately they have existed in two different silos.
The Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford University will operate in a world-class immunological context and help close this gap by providing the funding for basic science that will allow all the trials administered by the Center or linked to it to have an immune monitoring component that looks at biomarkers in immune response at each step along the way.
Other donors interested in supporting this work can now fund clinical research or scientific research, or buildings for laboratory research or for clinical research, so more people can be enrolled and better treatments can be applied faster.
Mr. Parker has a personal connection to this issue, having experienced firsthand the impact of life-threatening allergies. This experience has led Sean to found the Center in order to bring better solutions to people all over the world who continue to suffer from allergic conditions every day.
It is Mr. Parker’s hope that his donation will send a strong message to others in the philanthropic, public policy, research, medical, and public health community that funding and supporting research to better treat and cure allergic conditions is critical.
The Center will be led by Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, associate professor at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and Stanford University School of Medicine, whose research focuses on allergies.
A trailblazer in allergy research, Dr. Nadeau’s accomplishments include developing the first combination, multi-food-allergy therapy that has been shown to safely desensitize food-allergic patients to up to five different allergens at the same time. Dr. Nadeau has also led studies showing that the asthma drug omalizumab (brand name Xolair) can help speed the process of desensitizing a patient to a single food allergen or to combinations of food allergens via oral immunotherapy. She and her team have also demonstrated that oral immunotherapy changes the DNA of patients’ immune cells. They are now investigating whether these changes can be used to track a patient’s level of desensitization to food allergens. They are also trying to investigate whether oral immunotherapy could someday be replaced by therapy using other routes. In addition, Dr. Nadeau and her colleagues will work on novel treatments for other immune disorders like asthma, allergic rhinitis, eczema, and gastroenterological diseases.
Dr. Nadeau has treated 700 patients through clinical trials in the last three years. Currently, there are 320 patients (both adult and children) in clinical trials at Stanford.
About one in three Americans suffers from some form of allergy, and doctor-diagnosed food allergies affect one in 12 American children under the age of 21 and one in 50 adults. Of those individuals with a food allergy, approximately 25 percent will have a near-fatal anaphylactic reaction at some point in their lives. Around 15 million people in the U.S. suffer from food allergies.
