Changing the Peanut, Not the Patient: Sheba’s New Strategy for Treating Food Allergies
“Food allergy has become a very severe, very widespread problem, a huge problem, a life-threatening problem,” Prof. Kidon, Head of the Food Allergy Research Program at Sheba.Traditionally, immunotherapy focuses on training the immune system to accept the allergen. But Prof. Kidon’s team flipped the concept:
“Instead of making the immune system adapt to the peanut, let’s make the peanut a little bit different.”The science behind the approach focuses on protein structure. Native peanut proteins are tightly folded, and the immune system reacts to short sequences—called peptides—hidden within that structure. “Having an allergy is actually a wrong decision,” she explains. “Your immune system decides that these proteins are something really dangerous.” By unfolding the protein and changing its shape, Sheba’s researchers made it recognizable to the immune system without triggering a threat response. “When you come in with a protein that you’ve changed, and now it’s not this big ball of something inside, but it’s very opened up, the cells of your immune system recognize: yes, this is a peanut. Stop reacting.”
A Cookie That Reprograms the Immune Response
The result is ‘Mona Cookies’—a food-based treatment that delivers the modified protein in a familiar, safe format. In a clinical trial involving 32 children with severe peanut allergies, the cookies were administered over 40 weeks, “[at the end of which] at least 28 of the 32 of them are now eating ad-lib peanuts,” Prof. Kidon shares.
This approach avoids the side effects often associated with conventional desensitization. “As a pediatrician, there is absolutely no way I can convey how important it is to start early, to do this without those significant side effects,” she adds
Looking Ahead
The same method can be applied to other allergens, including walnuts and cashews. “We know by now that I can use exactly the same technology and exactly the same thing to treat walnut allergy and cashew allergies and everything that is plant-based,” says Prof. Kidon.
“This is a game changer,” she concludes. For families living with food allergies, Sheba’s approach offers not just hope—but real, evidence-backed change.
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