A while ago I wrote an article about this really cool thing called the Viaskin Patch, made by DBV technologies SA, a French biotechnology company.
For those who haven’t read the article, the Viaskin Patch is essentially a patch that people stick to their bodies that increases tolerance to peanut and tree nut allergies. The FDA recently reviewed it, and it results don’t look too positive.
Previous trials for the DBV Viaskin patch were not able to outperform the placebo, so DBV technologies definitely had a lot to fix, and their new Viaskin patch is much more effective than their previous version, but it still comes short. Based on newer statistics, the Viaskin patch only decreases sensitivity to peanuts by 35%, as opposed to the 13% from the placebo group.
Of course this is a large improvement from previous tests, but they’re still coming way short of their goal, and their patches to decrease sensitivity to milk allergies haven’t been doing much better either. Current projections for the Viaskin peanut patch say that, with luck, it will be on the market by 2020, but they will have to make some serious improvements by then.
This testing failure comes at an especially sensitive time for Viaskin, as the phase 3 testing for Aimmune Therapeutics’s peanut allergy treatment AR101 reached its testing goal. This means that the future for peanut allergy treatment might not lie in the Viaskin patch, but in the Aimmune Ar101 pills.
Of course, only time will tell what solutions work, and I am not one to trust anything until there has been a significant amount of testing over a significant amount of time. However, I think I’m now beginning to hold out hope that the solution to the peanut allergy community’s problems lie in these pills.
If anyone wishes to read more about this patch, or the AR101 pills, I’m posting some news links below.
https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/aimmune-dbv-peanut-allergy-results-data/517397/
https://www.ft.com/content/7a7a673c-163a-11e8-9e9c-25c814761640
If there are any more important updates on Viaskin or AR101, I will make sure to notify you readers.
Until next time!
Gary