Jeffrey SoRelle Awarded USDA NIFA Grant

Dr. Jeffrey SoRelle has been awarded a $392,000 research grant from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). The three-year study aims to revolutionize food allergy diagnostics by replacing the Oral Food Challenge (OFC) with a simple, scalable blood test.

Current allergy testing methods often rely on IgE levels, which can be misleading and require risky food challenges to confirm allergic reactivity. Dr. SoRelle’s research focuses on the glycosylation of Immunoglobulin E (IgE)—specifically sialylation—as a potential biomarker that could more accurately predict allergic responses.

“Recent findings suggest that post-translational modifications like glycosylation significantly influence the anaphylactic potential of IgE,” said Dr. SoRelle. “This project will explore whether measuring IgE sialylation can provide a safer, more reliable alternative to current diagnostic methods.”

Glycosylation is the process of adding sugars onto proteins and is hard to measure by current methods. Knowing the specific arrangements requires mass spectrometry instrumentation, complex software, and nearly 5 tubes of blood to get enough material to test. Further, this method can only detect total IgE levels and not allergen-specific IgE sugar patterns.

This new test will use a fraction of the blood (one- two drops), no complex software and could be performed in a routine clinical laboratory using a plate based approach.

If successful, this research could lead to a transformative diagnostic tool for food allergies, improving patient safety and reducing the need for invasive testing.