The allergy experts
bringing ILIT™ to
patients & practices.

"My journey to founding AILN started when I was in my final year of allergy/immunology fellowship. I came across a journal article published by Drs. Thomas Kundig and Gabriella Senti and their team at the University of Zurich. The article was about their first ILIT study on treating grass pollen allergic adults for allergic rhinitis. It was a head-to-head trial of SCIT and ILIT.

The study was really nicely laid out, showing that over the three-year treatment course, ILIT patients, treated over the first eight weeks, had similar outcomes to SCIT patients treated for the full three years. In the end, ILIT patients had fewer allergy symptoms, were using less medication, tolerated the treatment well, and had comparable results to the SCIT group.

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It was mind-blowing when I read that study. I thought, "This is the future of allergy treatment. One day, all allergists will be trained to do this technique, and it will be one of the standard offerings in allergy clinics."

I’ve always been passionate about immunotherapy and think it is fascinating how we can modulate the immune system. This incredible part of our body is constantly surveying everything, from our skin to the innermost parts of our body. The immune system is so complex and amazing, and when it doesn’t work right, we can retrain it.

So, when I became faculty at Nationwide Children's Hospital and The Ohio State University, I combined my passion for immunotherapy and my fascination with ILIT as my research focus.

At the time, there weren’t any FDA-approved food allergy treatments, and I saw an opportunity for treating food allergies with ILIT. We are in the process of working our patented food allergy treatment through the FDA approval process.

I had some really great mentors at Nationwide Children's and Ohio State, like Drs. Octavio Ramillo, Elizabeth Erwin, Rebecca Scherzer, Pete Mustillo, and Bryan Martin, who were key in encouraging me along the way. What I wanted to do—bring ILIT to the U.S.—was a big lift. It had never been done before, especially in pediatric patients, which was my focus at the time.

With the support of my mentors, I was able to connect with Dr. Thomas Kundig in Switzerland and bring him to the U.S. to educate our physicians about ILIT. I wrote the first clinical trial in the U.S., and Nationwide Children’s and Ohio State supported me in getting it through the FDA IND process. We got the first clinical trial off the ground, and the results were promising.

The next big jump came during the pandemic. Many of our patients on SCIT—some on weekly injections, some on monthly—just stopped coming in because everything was shut down. It hit me that we weren’t serving our patients if we weren’t offering them options that worked and fit their lifestyles. After some nudging from my allergist peers and friends, I realized it was time to bring ILIT to the market.

We opened our first Auni ILIT clinic and started offering it to patients. Soon after, we began getting calls and emails from patients and allergists around the world—patients wanting treatment and allergists wanting to learn how to do it.

Around that time, I was introduced to the concept of a healthcare learning network (HLN) by my colleague and mentor Dr. Oystein Fjeldstad, a business professor with expertise in the value of learning networks. This concept was being used at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and really spurred the idea of growing ILIT, increasing access for patients, and teaching other allergists how to do this procedure in a responsible way.

The idea was to develop a way for allergists to come together and say, “We need this for our patients. We know from the data that ILIT is effective and safe, and we want to do this together to help more patients. We can get patients feeling better quickly, and, over time, look at ways to further the science. We can pool effectiveness data and publish information about what doses work and which allergens can be treated with ILIT."

I’m really excited about the opportunities ahead for the Auni ILIT Learning Network—how many patients we can help and how many allergists we can support in bringing new life into their practices helping people who could benefit from immunotherapy but aren’t starting or sticking with traditional treatments. We also have a patented product that we’re starting to take through the FDA approval process for treatment, and AILN members will have the opportunity to serve as clinical trial sites.

My dream was and still is to cure food allergies with ILIT, and that has been my motivation for developing new treatments with it. ILIT really is the newest, most advanced form of immunotherapy and I can't wait to help expand its usage to help more patients."