NIAID has awarded 11 new cooperative agreements to support the Consortium for Food Allergy Research, or CoFAR, in the latest renewal of the program since its establishment 19 years ago. The institute expects to fund the awards with more than $11 million annually for seven years, contingent upon the availability of funds.
CoFAR’s goal is to conduct groundbreaking clinical research on food allergy prevention and therapy and on the biological mechanisms underlying food allergy. Conducting clinical research with a consortium of multiple study sites enables investigators to pursue questions that can only be answered through the participation of high numbers of study volunteers. Consortia also can potentially recruit a more diverse set of study participants than any single site could.
Most recently, CoFAR’s OUtMATCH clinical trial found that treatment with omalizumab (Xolair) substantially increased the amount of peanut, tree nuts, egg, milk and wheat that multi-food allergic children as young as 1 year could consume without experiencing an allergic reaction. The Food and Drug Administration approved Xolair for people with food allergy based on the study findings.
The new awards will support consortium-wide clinical research projects, which may include treatment or prevention clinical trials. The selection process for these consortium-wide projects began in March 2024. The awards also will support local food allergy-related clinical studies conducted by individual CoFAR sites and the completion of the remaining stages of the OUtMATCH trial.
The awards have been issued to the following institutions as one leadership center and ten clinical research centers:
Leadership Center
Johns Hopkins University (JHU)
Principal Investigators: Robert A. Wood (JHU); Supinda Bunyavanich and Scott H. Sicherer (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai)
Grant number UM1-AI182034-01
Clinical Research Centers
Arkansas Children's Hospital Research Institute
Principal Investigator: Stacie M. Jones
Grant number U01-AI181962-01
Boston Children's Hospital
Principal Investigator: Rima Rachid
Grant number U01-AI181964-01
Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
Principal Investigators: Amal Halim Assa’ad, Marc E. Rothenberg
Grant number U01-AI181966-01
Icahn School Of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Principal Investigator: Scott H. Sicherer
Grant number U01-AI181883-01
Johns Hopkins University
Principal Investigator: Robert A. Wood
Grant number U01-AI182032-01
Northwestern University at Chicago
Principal Investigators: Ruchi S. Gupta, Maria Cecilia Berin
Grant number U01-AI181897-01
Stanford University
Principal Investigators: Sayantani B. Sindher, R. Sharon Chinthrajah
Grant number U01-AI182039-01
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Principal Investigators: James R. Baker, Johann Eli Gudjonsson, Charles F. Schuler
Grant number U01-AI181882-01
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Principal Investigators: Edwin Kim, Corinne Keet
Grant number U01-AI182033-01
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Principal Investigators: Leonard B. Bacharier, Rachel Glick Robison
Grant number U01-AI181927-01