Dispute isn’t peanuts
Consider the peanut butter and jelly sandwich for a moment. It’s cheap, easy to fix, a staple of childhood lunchboxes and deadly for the 1.5 million Americans with peanut allergies. Just a half a peanut for some of these sufferers can cause their throats to swell shut. Each year peanut allergies kill 50 to 100 people in the United States alone. Most at risk are kids who sit next to a classmate in a lunchroom who is gobbling down a P&J, as just a whiff can be enough to sent the most sensitive into anaphylactic shock. The risk stays long after childhood when peanuts or peanut oil is used in processing food without being identified on the label.
So news this week was more than welcome that a drug, called TNX-901, has shown in clinical trials that it can significantly raise the threshold of peanut sensitivity. Even more encouraging, it is on the fast track for federal approval and it might be just as effective in treating other allergies.
Allergist Dr. S. Allan Brock, of Boulder, Colo., in an Associated Press story provided an insight into how much this drug is needed. “Basically, we would not be seeing people in the emergency room or the morgue from peanut accidents.”
It’s expected to be expensive, but worth the price for those that view a peanut as lethal. But they might not even get that chance as three companies – Genentech, Novartis and Tanox – are fighting over development rights. This legal tussle threatens to disrupt the third and necessary trial scheduled for summer and jam up for years approval of the drug.
Surely there exists a better way to settle the financial argument.