Welcome to Allergezy

Creating a Safe and Easy Genetic Test for Allergies

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Currently, all laboratory practices—except for the Oral Food Challenge—provide inconclusive results on whether a patient has a true food allergy or if a patient is only sensitized (does not have clinical food allergy symptoms). However, the Oral Food Challenge is dangerous and costly; in fact, a three-year-old child has recently died from such a test. Allergezy's goal is to use blood samples to create a safe, cheap, and accurate diagnostic test that can differentiate between food-allergic and food-sensitized patients.

Far more people are sensitized to foods with positive allergy tests than will actually react after exposure to the food. As allergists we need tests that will help us identify patients at risk for serious reactions. Allergezy aims to provide patients and clinicians with such a test. ~ Dr. Joseph Hernandez, Clinical Partner;
​Clinical Asst. Professor of Allergy and Immunology, Stanford University

I thought of Alastair, the innocent 3-year-old who had died during an Oral Food Challenge. In this day and age, how can we allow people to fall victim to a diagnostic test? ~ Ayush Alag, CEO & Founder

More About Allergies

Our Current Work

Food Allergy is a common disease (affecting roughly 15 million Americans) that occurs when exposure to a given food triggers an immune response. Current laboratory procedures are futile in differentiating between sensitization (mild symptoms) and true food allergies.​ Allergezy aims to make a diagnostic test that can accurately make this distinction.

Why Allergezy

Four years ago, Ayush Alag, the CEO and Founder of Allergezy, took skin prick and blood tests to determine whether he had a true food allergy or mild sensitization. The results were contradictory and inconclusive. His next step was to take the Oral Food Challenge, a test which could cause anaphylaxis and death. After undergoing that scary and painstaking process, Ayush decided to pursue the creation of a safe and accurate diagnostic test that would prevent erroneous diagnosis of allergies and make the dangerous Oral Food Challenges unnecessary. Allergezy's diagnostic classifier has the potential to improve the lives of those unsure about the status of their food allergies. It also promises to reduce the need for the dangerous food challenges.

Working with Dr. Joseph Hernandez, our clinical partner and an allergist at Stanford University, Allergezy is currently collecting blood samples to enhance its diagnostic classifier. We have received a Sequencing Grant from Illumina to sequence the blood samples. These additional samples will increase the size of the currently available DNA Methylation data set for allergies, and this larger sample size will be used to further refine and validate our algorithms. It is an important step in our long-term goal to implement an safer and more accurate diagnostic test in worldwide clinics, which would hopefully help both patients and doctors.

Past Work & Research

Our completely data-driven feature selection algorithm led our machine-learning classifier to diagnose at an accuracy of 100% on completely hidden data. In the process, we also found key genomic regions that may be associated with food allergy. Some of these genes were novel associations while others were found in previous studies, validating our methodology. Our team is collecting more samples through our work with Dr. Hernandez, and we are using a sequencing grant from Illumina to utilize those new samples towards improving our current predictor.