Immunotherapeutic Approaches to Common and Severe Hypersensitivity Reactions

Allergies have been characterized as a medical disorder for thousands of years, yet it was only in the last hundred years scientists have been able to establish the cause behind them. The term allergy/asthma is a collective term for the diseases: asthma, rhinoconjuctivitis, food allergies, atopic dermatitis, angioedema, urticaria, anaphylaxis, and insect and drug allergies (Holgate & Polosa, 2008). Cases of allergic reactions date all the way back to 3500 BC when Egyptian King Menses reportedly died from a bee sting. In the last 20 years the prevalence of allergies has doubled. Up to 40% of the world’s population has a predilection for developing allergies, while a third show active symptoms. Allergies became a subject of medical interest in the 1800s. In 1819 a physician by the name of John Bostock first coined the term hayfever. In 1872 Morrill Wyman discovered that ragweed was the cause of the then-termed “autumnal catarrh”. The following year Charles Blackley made the discovery that grass pollen was the causative agent of hay fever.

Beginning in the early 1900s, physicians started to attempt to find ways of modulating the immune response to food allergies, pollen allergies, asthma, and other types of allergic reactions. Shortly after, the work on allergy treatment began in 1911 by British physician Dr. Leonard Noon, considered the founding father of allergy immunotherapy. Noon noticed certain patients who displayed allergic reactions to grass pollen could sometimes be cured of their ailment. Noon hypothesized that the allergies were being caused by some sort of toxin in the pollen and by injecting small amounts of the toxin into patients, one could build up an immunity over time. As a result, Noon became the first person to inject allergens into a patient subcutaneously in order to elicit a protective response. Shortly thereafter Dr. John Freeman, a colleague of Leonard Noon at the Department of Therapeutic Inoculation at St. Mary’s Hospital in

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