About Us

Food Allergy is a common disease, affecting roughly 15 million Americans. The risks of food allergies are high in both a physical and an economic sense: they can cause life-threatening anaphylaxis, and lead to increased costs of around $5,000 per year. Currently, laboratory procedures are ineffective in differentiating between sensitization (have mild symptoms) or an true Food Allergy.​ Allergezy aims to make an accurate blood-based diagnostic test which can differentiate between food-allergic and food-sensitization.  ​Such a test could potentially improve the quality of life of affected patients and reduce dramatically ER visits for anaphylactic food allergy reactions. Using the genes we found, we plan on also investigating therapeutic solutions to allergies and immune diseases as a whole.

Meet Our Team

Troubled by the inconclusive results that current blood tests and skin prick tests give and the dangerous of an Oral Food Challenge, our team seeks to create a safe, cheap, and accurate diagnostic test, using blood samples, that can differentiate between patients who are sensitized and those who have a true food allergy. We have been fortunate to obtain a Sequencing Grant from Illumina Inc., which we will use to sequence new samples and refine our diagnostic classifier.

Ayush Alag

Founder and CEO

  • Has dedicated four years of research to food allergies, a life-changing problem from which he personally suffered.
  • First Prize winner at Synopsys Science Fair 2018 for work on allergies  
  • Perfect score on the SAT ​ 
  • USA Biology Olympiad Semifinalist

Joseph Hernandez, M.D, Ph.D.

Clinical Partner

  • Clinical Asst. Prof. Allergy and Immunology, Stanford University
  • Practicing allergy clinician
  • Many distinguished research publications​

Advisors

Hinco Gierman, Ph.D.

  • VP of Life Sciences, Integra Connect
  • PostDoc, Stanford University
  • Expert in bioinformatics: many high-impact publications

Taranjit Samra, DRSc

  • Expert in Regulatory Compliance and Quality Assurance
  • Has worked at Verily (formerly Google Life Science), Grail, Illumina, and Varian Medical Systems
  • Expert in guiding companies to build a diagnostic clinical test

Mahmoud Ghandi, Ph.D.

  • Senior Group Leader, Cancer Models Atlas Genomics, Broad Institute, MIT
  • ​Expert in high-throughput genomics integrated with large-scale small molecules, shRNA, and CRISPR screens

Allergezy: Making Allergy Diagnosis Safe and Easy