08-05-2025
Robert Wood
Living with severe food allergies clouds every day with fear. When the tiniest smidge of peanuts or wheat could kill you, everything revolves around managing that risk.
Dr. Robert Wood has worked to give people with food allergies greater peace of mind: the first medication to help reduce allergic reactions to multiple foods. In February 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration expanded its approval of the asthma drug Xolair to include treatment of food allergies in patients over age 1. Researchers had been studying the drug's effectiveness for this use for more than a decade.
'We've treated food allergy just as it was 100 years ago, which was trying to avoid what you're allergic to, and if you have an accident, then you treat the reaction, which can be very serious,' says Wood, director of allergy, immunology, and rheumatology at Johns Hopkins Children's Center and principal investigator of the study that finally led to Xolair's expanded approval. 'It's been a huge unmet need.'
In Wood's research, 67% of people who were highly allergic to peanuts and taking Xolair could tolerate a moderate to large amount of the nuts without having a reaction, and those outcomes were similar for other allergens, like eggs and milk. That means a college student who once had to decline her friends' invites to go out to eat, for example, can now tag along and not obsess over cross-contamination. Wood sees patients in his office celebrating that newfound freedom every day. 'It was a long time coming,' he says.
