Allergenicity Prediction Toolbox for novel foods

Introduction of novel foods, such as insects, will strongly contribute to the security and sustainability of our food supply. However, these novels foods need to be safe (EU regulation 2015/2283). Allergenicity assessment is an essential part of the safety assessment of novel foods. Unfortunately, current methods to assess de novo allergenicity lack predictive power and are not validated.

Consequently, food producers and risk assessors struggle with allergenicity assessment, slowing down the introduction of novel foods in our food supply.

Enabling the safe introduction of novel foods, while protecting humans from unacceptable food allergy risks, calls for a multidisciplinary approach.

The ALLPreT consortium is a highly multidisciplinary group of experts from universities, research institutes, hospitals, patient organisations and industry arising from the EU COST Action ImpARAS (Improved Allergenicity Risk Assessment Strategy).

This puts them in an ideal position to consolidate their previous collaboration and set up an innovative doctoral training network in this area.

The overall goal of ALLPreT is to train the next generation of scientists who can tackle the shortcomings in the current food allergy assessment of novel food products.

ALLPreT will train early stage researchers (ESRs) in the core aspects of food allergy risk assessment, immunology, protein chemistry, bioinformatics, in vitro/in vivo/in silico model development and complementary “soft” skills to deliver well educated young scientists, with a unique position within the EU labour market.

The ESRs will explore the new field of research on de novo sensitisation by novel foods and develop a toolbox of in vitro/in vivo/in silico allergenicity prediction tools that are scientifically sound, validated and easily usable by industry and food safety authorities.

This toolbox will contribute to fast and accurate safety assessment, thereby speeding up safety approval and market uptake of novel foods.