Marin student evolves from allergy sufferer to allergy scholar

Ari Shakked drew on his own experience as an immunotherapy patient for a senior research project at Marin Academy.

Many student research projects can be compelling. Ari Shakked’s review of oral immunotherapy treatments for food allergy sufferers was personal.

Shakked’s work, one of nine high school senior projects presented in May at a Marin Academy symposium in San Rafael, was based on a protocol that changed his life forever.

More than a decade ago, Shakked participated in a clinical trial for an oral immunotherapy treatment that became the topic of his research.

“It was sort of the last hope,” said Shakked, 18, of Strawberry. “It truly saved my life.”

Shakked, who plans to start a pre-medicine program in August at Washington University in St. Louis, said the 2012 clinical trial at Stanford University changed him from a boy with a debilitating homebound existence stifled by fear of allergic reactions to an outgoing, successful, productive, athletic teenager.

“It showed me firsthand at 7 years old the power of medicine, and how far we’ve come in medical advancements in a way that truly saved my life,” Shakked said. “I would be leading such a totally different lifestyle if it weren’t for these trials.”

Once afraid to ingest anything or even have contact with anything outside the home for fear it might have a trace of peanuts, walnuts or nut oil and would cause a severe allergic reaction — or even death — Shakked spent his early years in fear and seclusion.

“I couldn’t go to friends’ houses on a sleepover,” he said. “My parents had to completely vet my friends’ homes first before they would allow me to have a playdate.”

Fast forward a decade. Shekked had a routine skin test for allergies about a year ago, and there were no reactions, he said.

“I play a lot of soccer,” he said of his current life. “I play music — I play the saxophone.”

He is working as a overnight camp counselor this summer — a job that might have been out of the question if he were still in the throes of the debilitating food allergies.

“I love to work with kids,” he said, noting that he stays in the summer camp dormitory with no problems. “It’s another one of those things that I never, ever, would have been able to do.”

Shakked is grateful to Dr. Kari Nadeau, who ran the clinical trial at Stanford, and Kim Yates, a parent of a food allergy sufferer who helped fund the trial.

Nadeau and Yates have since co-founded clinics in Marin and elsewhere in the Bay Area under the name Latitude Food Allergy Care to offer the protocol to other families.

“As a food allergy mom and founder of Latitude, I have been so lucky to be able to witness the incredible transformation of so many children with food allergies who blossom into empowered, confident young adults with a passion for giving back to the food allergy community,” Yates said in an email.

“From Ari’s brave participation in a pivotal clinical trial at Stanford, to his self-advocacy with his long-term care at Latitude, I am so proud to see what will be next for Ari in college and beyond,” Yates said.

Shakked, for his part, is grateful to Yates and Nadeau for allowing him access to some of the clinic’s accumulated patient data on food challenges for use in his Marin Academy science project, he said. The project attempted to refine and correlate the data on food challenges — in which patients are exposed to a small sample of a particular food to see if there is a reaction — so that physicians may make more specific diagnoses, Shakked said.

“It was awesome,” Shakked said of the project. “It was such a unique experience.”

Marin Academy runs a regular program, the Marin Academy Research Collaborative, or MARC, that arranges for high school students to participate at high-level research labs across the country. The independent STEM — or science, technology, engineering and math — research program is coordinated by Amy Strauss, a Marin Academy science teacher.

“From day one, Ari was ready to work hard and eager to contribute to real-world improvements in allergy development, diagnosis and treatment,” Strauss said in an email. “He carried that dedication through to graduation and beyond.”

Shakked’s MARC project “was a novel research angle,” Strauss said. “His findings suggest some promising directions for further investigation.”

Shakked was 6 years old when he and his brother, Aviv, began the then-experimental food allergy trial using oral immunotherapy to treat multiple allergens simultaneously.

He and his family commuted an hour and a half each way from their Marin home to Stanford three or four times a week for about a year.

At that time, the standard treatment for food allergies was complete avoidance of allergens. For some families, especially those with children who were allergic to multiple substances, that meant days and nights of wiping down surfaces, door knobs and clothing and screening contact with all people and food.

Exposure to even a crumb or a drop of the substance could mean a trip to the emergency room and a shot of epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, from an EpiPen. The EpiPens are one of the few ways to cut short potentially lethal anaphylactic shock.

Shakked, who was allergic to peanuts and walnuts, said he had two severe allergic reactions as a young child prior to starting the clinical trial.

At about 4 years old, he ate a cookie at a party at a neighbor’s house. His throat choked up and he couldn’t breathe. A year later, he was at a pizza restaurant with his family. When he ate a salad with pecans in it, he again went into anaphylactic shock. With family around, he was able to get treatment in time.

In the allergy tests, some sufferers will react to a skin pin prick of the food substance with an itchy, circular red welt called a weal. Others may have swelling or a partial start of organ shutdown.

The oral immunotherapy program calls for introduction of very tiny doses of the allergens while also taking Xolair, an immunosuppressive drug that helps mitigate the allergic reactions. The dose amounts are progressively increased until the sufferer is eating a full serving of each allergen every day.

Shakked said he plans to go to medical school with a specialty in pediatrics or something else closely related to childhood allergies. He said he hopes to help kids with food allergies overcome them and thrive, as he did.

“I’m so incredibly fortunate that it all worked out,” Shakked said. “Now, there are so many kids who can be treated for it.”