Introduction: Allergies are among the most prevalent chronic diseases worldwide. Allergen-specific immunotherapy is used as an alternative treatment to pharmacotherapy. These immunotherapies are performed with crude extracts, which have disadvantages when compared to the new approaches, among them are recombinant proteins and hypoallergens. This review aims to assess immunotherapy for allergies through patent application analysis spanning recent decades.
Areas covered: Patents referring to allergen immunotherapies used in allergy treatment. Data were obtained from the Espacenet® website, using the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) system. Two-hundred-and-one patent applications were analyzed, taking into consideration their classification by the type of technology and applicant.
Expert opinion: Allergen-specific immunotherapy represents the only potentially curative therapeutic intervention for the treatment of allergic diseases. The extract-based immunotherapy is being replaced by the use of recombinant allergens, highlighting the hypoallergenic forms, which have low IgE-binding while retaining T-cell reactivity. It is expected that the development of hypoallergens will expand the scope of allergen-specific immunotherapy, especially if associated with alternative systems for expression and delivery systems with future potential. Furthermore, these new developments will likely address the problem of long-term protocols in allergen-specific immunotherapy, thus allowing better patient adherence and compliance.
Keywords: Allergen-specific immunotherapy; DNA shuffling; allergy; hypoallergens; in silico mutagenesis; patent applications; recombinant peptides; technology assessment.