Australian researchers have made a major world-first breakthrough in their investigation into how allergies can be “switched off”.

Murdoch Children’s Research and WA Telethon Kids Institute researchers have discovered the immunological changes that occur in children who receive successful treatment for peanut allergies.

Kids were given a probiotic alongside immunotherapy doses for 18 months as part of a Melbourne trial published in 2015, and three-quarters of them were then able to eat peanuts. But researchers didn’t know why the treatment worked, until now.

“The next step forward is having better treatments that are going to be able to deliver this lasting remission outcome for families,” group leader of allergy immunology research at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Professor Mimi Tang, told Liam Bartlett on 6PR Mornings.

“The communications going on in their immune system was mainly a lot of chatter between allergy type genes in a network, and in a coordinated way, driving forward  an allergy response.

“As the treatment was implemented… all the allergy genes in the immune cells were now not talking to each… and had collapsed… instead different genes were chatting furiously, so-called ‘tolerance-promoting genes’ in this very large network of regulatory activity.”

Press PLAY below to hear about the major allergy breakthrough