Dr. Wesley Burks, a food allergy expert at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., wrote in the Lancet medical journal that a solution appears to be on the horizon.
"I think there's some type of immunotherapy that will be available in five years. And the reason I say that is that there are multiple types of studies that are ongoing now," Burks said in a telephone interview.
Ideally, such a therapy would change a person's immune response to peanuts from an allergic one to a nonallergic one, Burks said.
He said one possible approach is using engineered peanut proteins as immunotherapy. Other approaches are showing promise, he said, including the use of Chinese herbal medicine in animal research.
Genetic engineering may also produce an allergen-free peanut, Burks said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24426038/