Peanut butter fingerprints

Stanford University School of Medicine's Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research was launched last year to aggressively pursue treatments with long-term benefits for severe allergies. Now, a team at the center has employed a microfluidic technology to monitor patients during immunotherapy, and shown that the approach identified defined fingerprints that predict which patients will benefit the most.

The study, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, followed patients undergoing daily peanut allergen immunotherapy who began by ingesting a small amount of the allergen, and built up the doses over 24 months...