Two recently-published articles discuss the assessment process to determine the allergenic potential of novel proteins. Currently, no single factor is recognized as an identifier for protein allergenicity. The current approach is based on several factors known about allergenic proteins and includes multi-laboratory evaluation of novel proteins. However current approaches have not been thoroughly evaluated or validated for predicting protein allergenicity.

An article “Current codex guidelines for assessment of potential protein allergenicity” was published in the Food and Chemical Toxicology journal and is now available on line.

The report from a workshop held last year has also recently been published in Food and Chemical Toxicology: “Current and future methods for evaluating the allergenic potential of proteins: International workshop report 23–25 October 2007”. The workshop included over 40 international experts from government, industry, and academia. Outcomes from the workshop included the need for additional research to develop and validate an animal model for the purpose of predicting protein allergenicity. The workshop participants concluded the current bioinformatic approaches are highly conservative. Reference: Vol 46( 9), pp 3219-3225.