Blog — September 2022

Dinner is Served – Hope is on the Menu

How do you feel when you sit down at a restaurant and dread navigating the menu for something you or your child can safely order? Embarrassed? Anxious? Worried?

We understand those feelings because our founders – and many of our scientific investigators – know from their own lives the daily challenges and dangers of living with food allergies.

This understanding paired with the quest for knowledge motivates FASI to imagine a world where we don’t have to pore over the ingredients list of every packaged food we buy. Where we can join friends for dinner party or send our kids for a sleepover without detailing dietary restrictions. Where we can confidently order at a restaurant without grilling the server about food content or cross-contamination. Where when dinner is served, hope is on the menu.

Searching for a Cure

Since FASI’s founding, we’ve created the foundation for a deeper understanding of the biology of food allergies. We are now positioned to lay the groundwork for the development of effective diagnostics and treatments for patients with food allergies.

FASI has several unique characteristics that will allow us to achieve our goals.

Our Model

FASI is changing the way science is done. We bring together scientists from different institutions and disciplines to work together to solve food allergies. We work in dynamic partnership with our scientific community, recruiting the greatest minds with the expertise and technology to join our team and map out the scientific plan. The result is more than 100 scientists meeting twice a month to review data, plan next steps and discuss needs within the field.

A Diverse Team of Experts

We have brought together the best and the brightest scientists from diverse disciplines. Our scientific team includes 12 different institutions, 100 scientists and disciplines including immunology, neuroscience, rheumatology, infectious disease, gastroenterology, engineering and computational biology. Our mantra is “Collaborative, not Competitive.”

A Proven Track Record

We clear the path from idea to outcome. Chief scientific officer Ruslan Medzhitov, PhD, leads FASI scientists. His breakthrough discovery that food allergies arise at the interface of two critical systems in the body – the immune and nervous systems – was a crucial advance in our understanding of the biology of food allergies. We built an infrastructure to quickly mobilize discoveries and fortify the process from idea to outcome. Promising science must reach patients faster and we are dedicated to moving nimbly and swiftly to make that possible.

Breakthrough Technologies

FASI scientists are exploiting these new breakthroughs in our understanding of food allergy with a toolbox of leading technologies, developed by FASI scientists, for biological discovery. Our researchers have already applied these tools – designed to understand the roles of single genes and cells quickly and accurately – to questions about the immune system with great effect. Now we are using them to understand the interactions between immune cells, microbes, nervous system and potential allergens that lead to food allergy.

In short, through our pioneering processes and research, we’re providing more hope to those with food allergies so that someday opening a menu won’t be a moment of apprehension, but a cause for excitement.

FASI is making incredible strides every day towards finding a cure for food allergies, but we need your help! Whether you’d like to join our game-changing team of investigators or help fund our groundbreaking food allergy research, we want to hear from you.