There has been a lot of research involved in desensitizing patients to a specific allergen. Although effective, the process doesn’t solve the issue at its biochemical root, which is that the IgE antigens are over reacting to a harmless stimuli and binding to things when they shouldn’t be. Additionally, desensitizing therapies can be expensive for the patient and they can take decades to build up enough effective tolerance. But that is far from the only solution, there is more than one way to do most things.
There are ways to inhibit just about every protein, most proteins have regulation mechanisms and if you figure out how those mechanisms work and what substrates are involved, you can create the right chemical environment to inhibit the protein’s function, and that is what some scientists have done. Although this trial was tested for raspatory allergens like pollen and hey fever, the therapy may be generalized to all IgE related reactions.
They block particular receptors with an antibody called omalizumab, which sounds like a town in Russia but it blocks interactions between IgE and FcεRI, preventing the IgE antigen from being released, effectively making them obsolete. This article was about a clinical trial where several similar antibodies that prevent IgE from interacting with FcεRI were being compared against each other, they were all statistically significant improvement in the patients but determined that it didn’t really mater if you used omalizumab or another antibody. This is good news because, there is always a creative way to solve a problem, it isn’t as though making ourselves sick with desensitizing therapy (which can take years and thousands of dollars to be effective) and intentionally infesting our guts with worms are our only options.