Sarita Patil, M.D.

Pioneered the application of allergen specific florescent multimers to affinity select allergen-specific B cells in peanut allergic individuals

Sarita Patil is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and an assistant in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is a physician-scientists and member of the MGH Food Allergy Center specializing in the treatment of patients with food allergies. Her laboratory, in the Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases, focuses on understanding antibody and B cell responses in both the initiation and treatment of allergic diseases, with a particular focus on food allergies. Her interests include; food allergies, eosinophilic esophagitis, eosinophilic gastrointestinal disease, and chronic hives.

Sarita Patil’s research with FASI focuses on understanding how peanut-specific IgG antibodies develop and contribute to clinical protection. Her laboratory pioneered the application of allergen specific florescent multimers to affinity select allergen-specific B cells in peanut allergic individuals. Using these techniques, she will identify precursors of the Ara h 2 specific BCR repertoires that correlate with tolerance in OIT and with peanut sensitization compared to allergy to study the evolution of allergen-specific antibodies in peanut allergy. She will also use these methods to evaluate the contribution of allergen-specific B cells to the antibody repertoire in peanut allergy. Using these tools, her research will inform and influence the development of next-generation therapeutics for food allergies.

Featured Publications:
Patil SU, Ogunniyi AO, Calatroni A, Tadigotla VR, Ruiter B, Ma A, Moon J, Love JC, Shreffler WG. Peanut oral immunotherapy transiently expands circulating Ara h 2-specific B cells with a homologous repertoire in unrelated subjects. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2015; 136(1): 125-134.e12. PMID: 25985925

Patil SU, Steinbrecher J, Calatroni A, Smith N, Ma A, Ruiter B, Virkud Y, Schneider M, Shreffler WG. Early decrease in basophil sensitivity to Ara h 2 precedes sustained unresponsiveness after peanut oral immunotherapy. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2019; pii: S0091-6749(19)30977-7. PMID: 31377342

Jimenez-Saiz R, Ellenbogen Y, Bruton K, Spill P, Sommer DD, Lima H, Waserman S, Patil SU, Shreffler WG, Jordana M. Human BCR analysis of single-sorted putative IgE+ memory B cells in food allergy. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2019; 144(1):336-339.e6. PMID: 30959060

Shade KC, Conroy ME, Washburn N, Kitaoka M, Huynh DJ, Laprise E, Patil SU, Shreffler WG & Anthony RM. Sialyation of immunoglobulin E is a determinant of allergic pathogenicity. Nature, 2020; 582(7811):265-270. PMID: 32499653