From reaction to resolution: The future of allergy treatment

Twelve-year-old Lauren Eglite was thrilled to attend a Notre Dame football game with her father, Erik, in 2017, even though her acute peanut allergy demands constant vigilance.

She was even more excited when the stadium’s brand-new video board aired an NBC Fighting For story about Basar Bilgicer’s research into blocking peanut allergens from triggering immune system overreactions. She asked her father, a drug company executive and Notre Dame business school alumnus, if this might be an opportunity to get involved with a solution to a condition that had complicated her life since childhood.

“I remember to this day her looking at that screen and turning to me,” Dr. Erik Eglite said. “She said, ‘Daddy, can I meet him? I really want to do something about it.’ This kid actually did that.”

It was a bold request, but Bilgicer didn’t hesitate after Dr. Eglite reached out. The Notre Dame professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering invited the whole Eglite family to his lab and explained his complex research in overwhelming detail.

The coincidence of that video playing to the right audience of two has led to immense mutual benefits. Nearly eight years later, Bilgicer and Eglite have partnered to form a company called Artin Immunology that aims to turn Bilgicer’s peanut allergy research into a blockbuster drug.

And Lauren, who shadowed in Bilgicer’s lab over two summers in high school, is now a first-year student at Notre Dame. She hopes to take part in the ongoing research that can help bring the allergen inhibitor to market within five years, as well as expand this unique platform to other immune system overreactions—from penicillin to shellfish to asthma.

“I’m very thankful and humbled to have had this opportunity,” Lauren said. “I know not everyone is able to be involved in researching their own cure, and I’m really happy just to be a small part of it.”

Targeting allergy inhibitors

Bilgicer is a scientist running a busy lab at Notre Dame, and Eglite is a pharmaceutical businessman with medical and law degrees. When the Eglite family toured his lab, both parties quickly recognized the benefits of creating a partnership.

“I’m not trying to fool anybody,” Bilgicer said. “I’m not a businessman. That’s why I have Erik and the rest of the Artin people on board. But I also want to make sure that I’m overlooking to see that the company is moving towards where it’s supposed to.”

Bilgicer’s concern isn’t frivolous. Several pharmaceutical and venture capital companies have contacted him about buying his inhibitor technology, which he patented through Notre Dame. However, he said these companies occasionally buy patents just to eliminate any potential competition—a “catch and kill” strategy.

He had also witnessed scientists running a company. He said George Whitesides, his mentor for postdoctoral research at Harvard University, started multiple companies in an environment much less complicated than today’s.

“There is no one way that companies will be started,” Bilgicer said. “There are multiple different paths. And mine is very unique in that I have a partner who watched that ad and was interested in getting in touch with me. I told him I was interested in commercializing this. He jumped on board because I intended to take it to the clinic all along—once I proved that it works and it’s safe.”

What makes Bilgicer’s approach unique is that his inhibitor targets only the potential allergen, blocking it from binding to the antibodies in the immune system that cause an overreaction.

Current solutions come in two forms. One is employed after the person begins symptoms, which can range from itchy skin and hives to tightness in the throat and even anaphylactic shock. Medicine such as antihistamines, corticosteroids, and EpiPens are only used after a reaction starts.

“There’s another treatment, basically knocking down a whole component of the immune system, which makes the patient more susceptible to other types of infections—it’s a shotgun method,” Bilgicer said.

“Our treatment is a surgical precision tool that identifies the molecules that are responsible—only those molecules that are responsible—for peanut-specific allergies. Hopefully the patient will be protected against accidental exposure to peanuts without any compromises on their immune system activity, which is necessary for healthy life.”

Life with peanut allergies

An estimated 6 million Americans cope with peanut allergies of varying degrees, according to Food Allergy Research and Education. The prevalence of peanut allergies has risen quickly in the last few decades, tripling from less than 1 percent of the US adult population in 1999 to about 3 percent more recently.

Lauren Eglite never wanted to be in this exclusive club. Raised in the north suburbs of Chicago, she remembers having to sit at the peanut-free table during grade school.

“It can be kind of humiliating, having your friends leave you to eat alone,” she said. “I remember in second grade they’d give us these placemats (to show food servers who is peanut-free). You’d have to put them on your lunch tray. You feel very singled out for it, and it can be hard kind of navigating that growing up.”

Her parents had to protect her until she was old enough to understand the danger, Dr. Eglite said. While she never had a true anaphylactic event, he said her throat swelled up and breathing became labored several times. They gave her Benadryl but never had to use the EpiPen.

“It’s almost total avoidance and it is just living very scared,” he said. “Is she going to accidentally eat it? In high school, she goes off to summer camp. They have peanut butter mixed with the whole breakfast. She can’t eat anything.”

This isn’t just overprotective parenting. Lauren’s uncle is married to a woman whose first husband died after eating peanuts on an airplane. He suffocated because no drugs were available to arrest his immune system overreaction.

Families like theirs have to check every grocery they buy to avoid bringing potential allergens home. They must call friends before birthday parties to ask what is being served. They quiz the waiter about every order and avoid restaurants that might cook with peanut oil or cross-contaminate foods.

“You’re hypersensitive about this because one time and you could be dead,” Dr. Eglite said.

Lauren now carries the Benadryl and EpiPen, but Dr. Eglite said it’s a lot to ask a younger kid to jab a needle into their own thigh. She remembered eating a Caesar salad recently that she didn’t know had nuts in it.

“You don’t realize until you start to feel your throat and your tongue swell up,” she said. “You just know, and it sucks. You have to leave that situation.”

Bringing the allergy medicine to market

Bilgicer and Dr. Eglite have vastly different backgrounds that complement each other as co-founders of a company.

Bilgicer grew up in Istanbul, studied chemistry, and came to the United States for doctoral studies at Tufts University in 1999. At Harvard, he researched biological molecules and became interested in antibodies, which fight against pathogens but sometimes mistake the body’s own cells for foreign invaders. Now in McCourtney Hall, he came to Notre Dame in 2008 because he bought into the goal of “being a force for good.”

A Chicago native, Eglite went to Loyola University Chicago with the goal of becoming a medical malpractice lawyer like the hero of the movie Regarding Henry. After medical and law schools, he realized the field didn’t match his expectations and switched to the pharmaceutical business. He’s worked as a general counsel and corporate officer of startups and multinational companies, helping win regulatory approval of 16 FDA-approved drugs.

Eglite also earned an MBA from Notre Dame and has been involved in programs including ESTEEM and the Harper Cancer Research Institute. He jumped at the opportunity to partner with Bilgicer. “I listened and had great interest,” he said. “I was thinking, commercially, we can pull this off.”

There are multiple steps in any drug approval. Bilgicer and Eglite brought in Mark Kaplan of the Indiana University School of Medicine as a third company founder for his experience and resources in clinical trials. Kaplan was also instrumental in securing funding from a Falk Medical Research Trust award.

That step was crucial for keeping control of the company. “If you get money from a venture capitalist right in the beginning, you end up giving more of the company away,” Bilgicer said.

After publishing how his research worked in the lab in 2019, Bilgicer and Artin Immunology, a division of Artin Bioscience, spent several years proving it worked safely and effectively in a more complex environment—a live animal.

At the IU School of Medicine, researchers developed “humanized” mice, a process that replaces a mouse’s immune system with human immune cells so the mice will mimic the human immune response. They announced successful results in 2023.

The next step is non-human primate trials, which are done at government-regulated facilities. Finally, there are three phases of clinical trials involving humans, which are far more complex and costly, a process squarely in Eglite’s wheelhouse. The company hopes to start late this year.

“Typically, you don’t have efficacy in phase one, only safety, but we’re going to try to do that,” Eglite said. “If we can get some results there, we’ll be able to raise, I think, a lot of money.

“Our plan is to run through phase two and show one of the big pharmaceutical companies our safety and efficacy. Some big guy can take it from there (phase three), because our little company is not going to launch a drug. You need hundreds of sales reps and all that goes with that.”

The goal is to start phase two in 2026 and push to have a drug on the market by 2029. If all goes well, Eglite speculated that the company, and Notre Dame as patent holder, could have a blockbuster drug worth “an enormous amount of money.”

Other universities such as Northwestern and Stanford have proved this route is possible, he said. He plans to run company offices out of the IDEA Center at Innovation Park. “Notre Dame gave us a wonderful license agreement,” he said. “Notre Dame will do very well. I can’t ask for a better partner.”

The future of allergy care

Eglite and Bilgicer are mainly focused on what their allergen inhibitor can do for patients like Lauren. More recently, Bilgicer learned that his daughter is allergic to the sun. She has to be extremely careful about sunscreen.

Bilgicer isn’t certain his method of inhibiting allergens will work for his daughter. But he knows the platform has broad potential for other autoimmune conditions. He’s already developed inhibitors for shrimp and published a paper about a penicillin inhibitor.

“Right now, we’re looking at asthma,” he said. “For most asthma patients, it’s actually dust mite molecules, so we’re looking at developing inhibitors for dust mites.”

Farther down the line, he said, his lab may look into more complicated immune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and type 1 diabetes.

“We developed screening methods for what we call nano allergens to break down the interacting molecule allergens to their smaller components,” he said. “We can investigate and evaluate one component at a time using non-allergens. Once we identify the molecules that are really immunogenic, then we can develop inhibitors that are precise and specific to the allergen.”

Eglite said that while he can “mostly” discuss the science with Bilgicer, he also has to pitch the potential to big pharma executives: “I like to call it gold, glory, and the greater good.”