Peanuts on a plate can be deadly for those with severe allergies, but an Israeli startup company wants to alleviate that fear.
People with life-threatening allergies live in constant fear of coming into contact with deadly allergens. Researchers estimate that about 32 million Americans have food allergies, with the most severe being milk, egg, peanut, tree nuts, wheat, soy, fish, and shellfish.
"It is important to understand that just several years ago, this would not have been possible."
Every three minutes, a food allergy reaction sends someone to the emergency room, and 200,000 people in the U.S. require emergency medical care each year for allergic reactions, according to Food Allergy Research and Education.
But what if there was a way you could easily detect if something you were about to eat contains any harmful allergens? Thanks to Israeli scientists, this will soon be the case — at least for peanuts. The team has been working to develop a handheld device called Allerguard, which analyzes the vapors in your meal and can detect allergens in 30 seconds.
Leapsmag spoke with the founder and CTO of Allerguard, Guy Ayal, about the groundbreaking technology, how it works, and when it will be available to purchase.
What prompted you to create this device? Do you have a personal connection with severe food allergies?
Guy Ayal: My eldest daughter's best friend suffers from a severe food allergy, and I experienced first-hand the effect it has on the person and their immediate surroundings. Most notable for me was the effect on the quality of life – the experience of living in constant fear. Everything we do at Allerguard is basically to alleviate some of that fear.
How exactly does the device work?
The device is built on two main pillars. The first is the nano-chemical stage, in which we developed specially attuned nanoparticles that selectively adhere only to the specific molecules that we are looking for. Those molecules, once bound to the nanoparticles, induce a change in their electrical behavior, which is measured and analyzed by the second main pillar -- highly advanced machine learning algorithms, which can surmise which molecules were collected, and thus whether or not peanuts (or in the future, other allergens) were detected.
It is important to understand that just several years ago, this would not have been possible, because both the nano-chemistry, and especially the entire world of machine learning, big data, and what is commonly known as AI only started to exist in the '90s, and reached applicability for handheld devices only in the past few years.
Where are you at in the development process and when will the device be available to consumers?
We have concluded the proof of concept and proof of capability phase, when we demonstrated successful detection of the minimal known clinical amount that may cause the slightest effect in the most severely allergic person – less than 1 mg of peanut (actually it is 0.7 mg). Over the next 18 months will be productization, qualification, and validation of our device, which should be ready to market in the latter half of 2021. The sensor will be available in the U.S., and after a year in Europe and Canada.
The Allerguard was made possible through recent advances in machine learning, big data, and AI.
(Courtesy)
How much will it cost?
Our target price is about $200 for the device, with a disposable SenseCard that will run for at least a full day and cost about $1. That card is for a specific allergen and will work for multiple scans in a day, not just one time.
[At a later stage, the company will have sensors for other allergens like tree nuts, eggs, and milk, and they'll develop a multi-SenseCard that works for a few allergens at once.]
Are there any other devices on the market that do something similar to Allerguard?
No other devices are even close to supplying the level of service that we promise. All known methods for allergen detection rely on sampling of the food, which is a viable solution for homogenous foodstuffs, such as a factory testing their raw ingredients, but not for something as heterogenous as an actual dish – especially not for solid allergens such as peanuts, treenuts, or sesame.
If there is a single peanut in your plate, and you sample from anywhere on that plate which is not where that peanut is located, you will find that your sample is perfectly clean – because it is. But the dish is not. That dish is a death trap for an allergic person. Allerguard is the only suggested solution that could indeed detect that peanut, no matter where in that plate it is hiding.
Anything else readers should know?
Our first-generation product will be for peanuts only. You have to understand, we are still a start-up company, and if we don't concentrate our limited resources to one specific goal, we will not be able to achieve anything at all. Once we are ready to market our first device, the peanut detector, we will be able to start the R&D for the 2nd product, which will be for another allergen – most likely tree nuts and/or sesame, but that will probably be in debate until we actually start it.
Indigenous people in Australia dig pits next to a honeypot colony. Scientists think the honey can be used to make new antimicrobial drugs.
These hunts have become rarer, as many of the Tjupan people have moved away and, up until now, the exact antimicrobial properties of the ant honey remained unknown. But recently, scientists Andrew Dong and Kenya Fernandes from the University of Sydney, joined Ulrich, who runs the Honeypot Ants tours in Kalgoorlie, a city in Western Australia, on a honey-gathering expedition. Afterwards, they ran a series of experiments analyzing the honey’s antimicrobial activity—and confirmed that the Indigenous wisdom was true. The honey was effective against Staphylococcus aureus, a common pathogen responsible for sore throats, skin infections like boils and sores, and also sepsis, which can result in death. Moreover, the honey also worked against two species of fungi, Cryptococcus and Aspergillus, which can be pathogenic to humans, especially those with suppressed immune systems.
In the era of growing antibiotic resistance and the rising threat of pathogenic fungi, these findings may help scientists identify and make new antimicrobial compounds. “Natural products have been honed over thousands and millions of years by nature and evolution,” says Fernandes. “And some of them have complex and intricate properties that make them really important as potential new antibiotics. “
In an era of growing resistance to antibiotics and new threats of fungi infections, the latest findings about honeypot ants are helping scientists identify new antimicrobial drugs.
Danny Ulrich
Bee honey is also known for its antimicrobial properties, but bees produce it very differently than the ants. Bees collect nectar from flowers, which they regurgitate at the hive and pack into the hexagonal honeycombs they build for storage. As they do so, they also add into the mix an enzyme called glucose oxidase produced by their glands. The enzyme converts atmospheric oxygen into hydrogen peroxide, a reactive molecule that destroys bacteria and acts as a natural preservative. After the bees pack the honey into the honeycombs, they fan it with their wings to evaporate the water. Once a honeycomb is full, the bees put a beeswax cover on it, where it stays well-preserved thanks to the enzymatic action, until the bees need it.
Less is known about the chemistry of ants’ honey-making. Similarly to bees, they collect nectar. They also collect the sweet sap of the mulga tree. Additionally, they also “milk” the aphids—small sap-sucking insects that live on the tree. When ants tickle the aphids with their antennae, the latter release a sweet substance, which the former also transfer to their colonies. That’s where the honey management difference becomes really pronounced. The ants don’t build any kind of structures to store their honey. Instead, they store it in themselves.
The workers feed their harvest to their fellow ants called repletes, stuffing them up to the point that their swollen bellies outgrow the ants themselves, looking like amber-colored honeypots—hence the name. Because of their size, repletes don’t move, but hang down from the chamber’s ceiling, acting as living feedstocks. When food becomes scarce, they regurgitate their reserves to their colony’s brethren. It’s not clear whether the repletes die afterwards or can be restuffed again. “That's a good question,” Dong says. “After they've been stretched, they can't really return to exactly the same shape.”
These replete ants are the “treat” the Tjupan women dug for. Once they saw the round-belly ants inside the chambers, they would reach in carefully and get a few scoops of them. “You see a lot of honeypot ants just hanging on the roof of the little openings,” says Ulrich’s mother, Edie Ulrich. The women would share the ants with family members who would eat them one by one. “They're very delicate,” shares Edie Ulrich—you have to take them out carefully, so they don’t accidentally pop and become a wasted resource. “Because you’d lose all this precious honey.”
Dong stumbled upon the honeypot ants phenomenon because he was interested in Indigenous foods and went on Ulrich’s tour. He quickly became fascinated with the insects and their role in the Indigenous culture. “The honeypot ants are culturally revered by the Indigenous people,” he says. Eventually he decided to test out the honey’s medicinal qualities.
The researchers were surprised to see that even the smallest, eight percent concentration of honey was able to arrest the growth of S. aureus.
To do this, the two scientists first diluted the ant honey with water. “We used something called doubling dilutions, which means that we made 32 percent dilutions, and then we halve that to 16 percent and then we half that to eight percent,” explains Fernandes. The goal was to obtain as much results as possible with the meager honey they had. “We had very, very little of the honeypot ant honey so we wanted to maximize the spectrum of results we can get without wasting too much of the sample.”
After that, the researchers grew different microbes inside a nutrient rich broth. They added the broth to the different honey dilutions and incubated the mixes for a day or two at the temperature favorable to the germs’ growth. If the resulting solution turned turbid, it was a sign that the bugs proliferated. If it stayed clear, it meant that the honey destroyed them. The researchers were surprised to see that even the smallest, eight percent concentration of honey was able to arrest the growth of S. aureus. “It was really quite amazing,” Fernandes says. “Eight milliliters of honey in 92 milliliters of water is a really tiny amount of honey compared to the amount of water.”
Similar to bee honey, the ants’ honey exhibited some peroxide antimicrobial activity, researchers found, but given how little peroxide was in the solution, they think the honey also kills germs by a different mechanism. “When we measured, we found that [the solution] did have some hydrogen peroxide, but it didn't have as much of it as we would expect based on how active it was,” Fernandes says. “Whether this hydrogen peroxide also comes from glucose oxidase or whether it's produced by another source, we don't really know,” she adds. The research team does have some hypotheses about the identity of this other germ-killing agent. “We think it is most likely some kind of antimicrobial peptide that is actually coming from the ant itself.”
The honey also has a very strong activity against the two types of fungi, Cryptococcus and Aspergillus. Both fungi are associated with trees and decaying leaves, as well as in the soils where ants live, so the insects likely have evolved some natural defense compounds, which end up inside the honey.
It wouldn’t be the first time when modern medicines take their origin from the natural world or from the indigenous people’s knowledge. The bark of the cinchona tree native to South America contains quinine, a substance that treats malaria. The Indigenous people of the Andes used the bark to quell fever and chills for generations, and when Europeans began to fall ill with malaria in the Amazon rainforest, they learned to use that medicine from the Andean people.
The wonder drug aspirin similarly takes its origin from a bark of a tree—in this case a willow.
Even some anticancer compounds originated from nature. A chemotherapy drug called Paclitaxel, was originally extracted from the Pacific yew trees, Taxus brevifolia. The samples of the Pacific yew bark were first collected in 1962 by researchers from the United States Department of Agriculture who were looking for natural compounds that might have anti-tumor activity. In December 1992, the FDA approved Paclitaxel (brand name Taxol) for the treatment of ovarian cancer and two years later for breast cancer.
In the era when the world is struggling to find new medicines fast enough to subvert a fungal or bacterial pandemic, these discoveries can pave the way to new therapeutics. “I think it's really important to listen to indigenous cultures and to take their knowledge because they have been using these sources for a really, really long time,” Fernandes says. Now we know it works, so science can elucidate the molecular mechanisms behind it, she adds. “And maybe it can even provide a lead for us to develop some kind of new treatments in the future.”
