Welcome to the JACI’s new News Beyond Our Pages (NBOP) blog. This blog is intended to supplement our monthly News Beyond Our Pages feature, which highlights breaking news and recently published articles of interest to the allergy/immunology community. To launch our new blog, we asked Marc Rothenberg, MD, PhD, NBOP section co-editor, and Director of Allergy/Immunology and Professor of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to give us his thoughts as we enter a new year and a new decade, and to offer up his predictions for allergy/clinical immunology research and practice during the next ten years:
“As we enter this new decade, our specialty has a special opportunity to truly advance care of patients suffering from a variety of diseases including allergy, immunodeficiency, autoimmunity and a host of inflammatory disorders.
The last decade was marked by deciphering of the human genome and the preliminary assessment of its clinical value. I predict that during the next decade, we will begin to truly use the breakthroughs associated with rapid genome sequencing to identify disease etiology, including the role of occult infections and microbiomes, in the diseases of interest to our specialty. This approach will lead to the design of patient and disease specific therapy.
I hope that our discipline can advance from “allergy shots” to directed tolerance induction protocols truly based immune based mechanisms. This is likely going to be first evident in the food allergy field.
Finally, I predict that biological therapeutics, such as anti-cytokine agents, will be proven to be effective for allergic diseases including asthma and will garner FDA approval.”
We want to hear from you! Please feel free to post your own comments and/or predictions below. Topics and articles that you think would be of interest in our NBOP section and/or this blog can be sent to the JACI Editorial Office at jaci@njhealth.org.
Thanks for your predictions and this new initiative. Overall cytokine and anti-CD molecule agents have been disappointing in allergy although our rheumatology colleagues are having great advances with these agents. Possibly things like IL-4 and 5 are too downstream in polygenetic conditions like asthma. "Taking out a carrot from vegetable soup still leaves you with something that tastes like vegetable soup." So has been the experience of most anti-cytokine agents in asthma and allergy. Possibly Prof Rothenberg has an inkling or knowledge of new research and I look forward to an allergy meeting where we have more than antihistamines and steroids to treat our patients (okay – we have anti-IgE, immunoRx and anti-LT agents too). If predicting the main gains in allergy in the next decade– I think Celsus will be validated in his 30 AD statement that dolor (pain) is an important component of inflammation and our knowledge neural mechanisms of inflammation will allow us to conquer itch in dermatitis, and many of the symptoms of asthma and rhinitis.
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