The Meat Allergy: UVA IDs Biological Changes Triggered by Tick Bites

People who develop the allergy in response to the bite of the Lone Star tick often have to give up eating mammalian meat, including beef and pork, entirely. Even food that does not appear to contain meat can contain meat-based ingredients that trigger the allergy. That means people living with the meat allergy must be hyper-vigilant. (For one person’s experience with the meat allergy, visit UVA’s Making of Medicine blog.)

The allergy was first discovered by UVA’s Thomas Platts-Mills, MD, a renowned allergist who determined that people were suffering reactions to a sugar called alpha-gal found in mammalian meat. Exactly what is happening inside the body, though, has remained poorly understood. Erickson’s work, along with that of others at UVA, is changing that.

Erickson’s team in UVA’s Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology has found that people with the meat allergy have a distinctive form of immune cells known as B cells, and they have them in great numbers. These white blood cells produce antibodies that release chemicals that cause the allergic reaction to meat.

In addition, Erickson, a member of UVA’s Carter Immunology Center, has developed a mouse model of the meat allergy so that scientists can study the mysterious allergy more effectively.

“This is the first clinically relevant model that I know of, so now we can go and ask a lot of these important questions,” he said. “We can actually use this model to identify underlying causes of the meat allergy that may inform human studies. So it’s sort of a back-and-forth of experiments that you can do in animal models that you can’t do in humans. But you can identify potential mechanisms that could lead to new therapeutic strategies so that we can go back to human subjects and test some of those hypotheses.”
Findings Published

Erickson describes the new meat allergy model in an article in the Journal of Immunology. The research team consisted of Jessica L. Chandrasekhar, Kelly M. Cox, William M. Loo, Hui Qiao, Kenneth S. Tung and Erickson. Tung and Erickson are both part of UVA’s Carter Center.

Contacts and sources:
Joshua Barney
University of Virginia Health System