Recombinant allergens for
In vitro allergy diagnosis

A wide variety of protean allergens from our environment are proteins coming from food, mites, pollens from trees and grasses; and other natural products. These environmental proteins come primarily from non-pathogenic eukaryotic organisms (animals and plants) and are essentially innocuous. However, in some cases, our immune system reacts to them, unintentionally causing damage to our tissues and vital organs that occasionally generates serious systemic pathologies.

The development of recombinant allergens provides new opportunities for the improvement of the diagnosis of immunoglobulin E (IgE) mediated allergies, given that they present capacity for binding these antibodies in a comparable way to natural allergens and generally show good reactivity in in vitro diagnostic tests. For this reason, recombinant allergens are of a great interest to both the research field and the development of new diagnostic test for IgE quantification in the clinical routine. The measure of circulating IgE antibodies specific for a determined allergen provides information about the patient sensitisation to this allergen. In general, low IgE levels would indicate a low probability of developing a clinical disease, while high IgE levels would show a high correlation of developing disease.