Dr Andrew Flanagan, received funding from the safefood Training
and Mobility Programme to attend the iFAAM (Integrated Approaches to Food Allergen and Allergy Risk Management) bi-annual meeting in Vienna in February of this year. Andrew Flanagan is an Executive Analytical Chemist in the Western Regional Public Analyst’s Laboratory (PAL) located in Galway. You can read more about his visit in the report below.
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The iFAAM (Integrated Approaches to Food Allergen and Allergy Risk Management) bi-annual meeting took place in the Ibis Hotel, Vienna from the 24th to the 26th of February & I attended as an observer at the invitation of the lead partner, Professor Clare Mills of the Allergy and Respiratory Centre of The University of Manchester's Institute of Inflammation and Repair, based in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology.
This research project is funded under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission and officially began in March 2013 as a successor to the previous ‘Europreval’ food allergen project also led by Prof. Mills (then attached to the Institute of Food Research in Norwich).
There are 38 partners in this project ranging from publicly funded high-level research institutions such as the Universities of Manchester & Cambridge, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the Paul-Ehrlich Institute in Germany; industrial partners such as Nestlé & Unilever; medical research institutes including The Charité Hospital in Berlin, King’s College Hospital in London and Cork University Hospital; commercial scientific organisations including Eurofins, Leatherhead and Indoor Biotechnology; patient groups such as Anaphylaxis Ireland and Anaphylaxis UK. The partners in this project are from all over Europe, Australia and the United States of America.
The project is divided into a number of different ‘strands’ (called modules & work-packages) and these range from medically focused tasks such as the study of the development of allergies in young children, dietary interventions to prevent allergies, identification of risk factors & biomarkers for allergy, up to experimental studies inducing allergic reactions in known allergic patients in a controlled, medically supervised environment in an effort to both set appropriate levels for the presence of allergens in food and also understand what other factors (alcohol consumption, tiredness etc) that could increase the susceptibility of patients to allergens.
Another major focus of the project is to develop new methods for the detection of allergens in foods using both ‘classical’ immunological methods as well as more advanced chemical detection methods such as proteomic mass spectrometric techniques based on ‘time-of-flight’ separation and detection. As part of this work package significant effort is also being put into development of new extraction methods to extract allergens from food as well as the development of reference materials and certified standards for allergen analysis. While all aspects of the meeting were open to me it was the analytical area that was of most benefit to me as it enabled me to see the latest advances in food allergen detection, network with those carrying out this work and to form links with them and their institutes. Another worthwhile area of iFAAM work that will benefit the work of the PA lab service is the experimental efforts in this project to set limits for food allergens in foods, a major hurdle in food law enforcement and public health protection in this area currently.
More information see: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=9743 and https://www.icc.or.at/projects/ifaam
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