Emerging Food Allergy Biomarkers

Abstract

The management of food allergy is complicated by the lack of highly predictive biomarkers for diagnosis and prediction of disease course. The measurement of food-specific IgE is a useful tool together with clinical history but is an imprecise predictor of clinical reactivity. The gold standard for diagnosis and clinical research is a double-blind placebo-controlled food challenge. Improvement in our understanding of immune mechanisms of disease, development of high-throughput technologies, and advances in bioinformatics have yielded a number of promising new biomarkers of food allergy. In this review, we will discuss advances in immunoglobulin measurements, the utility of the basophil activation test, T-cell profiling, and the use of -omic technologies (transcriptome, epigenome, microbiome, and metabolome) as biomarker tools in food allergy.

Keywords: Basophil activation test; Biomarker; Components; Double-blind placebo-controlled food challenge (DBPCFC); Epigenome; Epitopes; Metabolome; Microbiome; T-cell receptor repertoire; Transcriptome.