Stallergenes Greer Foundation Honors Advances in Allergy Innovation Through 2025 Award Program
Stallergenes Greer Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2025 Science Awards for Allergy, recognizing four researchers whose work is helping advance the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of allergic diseases. The annual awards program, which supports scientific innovation and patient-centered research in allergy medicine, will provide a total of €100,000 in funding to this year’s awardees.
The foundation, which focuses on promoting allergy research, encouraging medical innovation, and addressing environmental factors associated with allergic diseases, said the 2025 edition builds upon the success of previous years by highlighting groundbreaking projects that may contribute to improved patient outcomes and more personalized approaches to allergy care.
This year, four researchers were selected by the Foundation’s Board across two major categories: the Innovation in Treatment Awards and the Patient Commitment Award. Each recipient will receive €25,000 to further support their ongoing research and scientific initiatives.
Allergic diseases continue to represent a major global health challenge, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Conditions such as asthma, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, eczema, and other immune-mediated disorders are increasing in prevalence in many countries, driven by a combination of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle-related factors. Researchers and clinicians are therefore increasingly focused on developing more precise diagnostic methods, targeted therapies, and patient-centered treatment strategies.
Among the recipients of the Innovation in Treatment Awards is Alexander Eggel, Associate Professor and PhD researcher affiliated with the University of Bern and University Hospital Bern in Switzerland. Eggel was recognized for his research project titled “Improving diagnostic and therapeutic options for allergic patients.”
His work focuses on advancing allergy diagnostics and developing therapeutic strategies that may help improve the identification and treatment of allergic conditions. Researchers in the field increasingly recognize the importance of precise diagnostic tools in allergy medicine, as accurate identification of allergens and immune responses is essential for delivering effective treatment and reducing the burden of chronic allergic disease.
Another recipient of the Innovation in Treatment Award is Janice A. Layhadi, a Research Associate at the National Heart and Lung Institute within Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. Layhadi was honored for her project exploring the cellular and molecular pathways influenced by allergen-specific immunotherapy in innate lymphoid cells through an integrated multi-omics research approach.
Multi-omics technologies have emerged as powerful tools in biomedical research, enabling scientists to study complex biological systems at multiple levels simultaneously, including genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics. By applying these technologies to allergy immunotherapy research, scientists hope to better understand how immune cells respond to treatment and identify biomarkers that may predict therapeutic success or guide personalized treatment strategies.
Layhadi’s research reflects growing interest in uncovering the underlying immune mechanisms associated with allergen immunotherapy, a treatment approach designed to gradually desensitize patients to allergens and reduce allergic reactions over time.
The third Innovation in Treatment Award recipient is Laurent Reber, Research Director of the ERC team “Asthma, Allergy & Immunotherapy” at Inserm and the INFINITY Institute in Toulouse, France.
Reber was recognized for his work on the “Development of allergen-specific mRNA vaccines for the treatment of allergic diseases.” The Stallergenes project highlights the growing interest in applying messenger RNA (mRNA) technology beyond infectious diseases and into broader therapeutic areas, including immunology and allergy treatment.
Following the global success of mRNA-based vaccines in infectious disease prevention, researchers have increasingly explored the technology’s potential in areas such as cancer immunotherapy, autoimmune diseases, and allergy medicine. Allergen-specific mRNA vaccines aim to modulate the immune system in a targeted manner, potentially offering more effective and personalized treatment options for patients with allergic disorders.
Experts believe that advances in mRNA-based therapeutic platforms could eventually reshape how allergic diseases are treated by enabling more precise immune modulation while minimizing side effects associated with conventional therapies.
The 2025 Patient Commitment Award was presented to Pablo Rodríguez del Río, an MD and PhD Stallergenes researcher working within the Allergy Department of Niño Jesús University Children’s Hospital, the Niño Jesús Hospital Biomedical Research Foundation, and the La Princesa Hospital Research Institute in Madrid, Spain.
Rodríguez del Río was honored for his work titled “Understanding patient’s perspective and relevance of food immunotherapy outcomes. The COFAITH project.” His research emphasizes the importance of incorporating patient experiences and expectations into allergy treatment evaluation, particularly in the field of food immunotherapy.
Food allergies can significantly affect quality of life, creating anxiety, dietary restrictions, and social challenges for patients and families. While clinical studies often focus on biological outcomes and symptom reduction, there is increasing recognition that patient-reported experiences and treatment satisfaction are equally important measures of success.
The COFAITH project seeks to better understand how patients perceive food immunotherapy outcomes and how these perspectives can inform clinical decision-making and treatment development. Patient-centered research initiatives such as this are becoming increasingly important in modern healthcare as clinicians and researchers work to ensure that therapies address both medical and quality-of-life concerns.
Dominique Pezziardi, Chairman of the Stallergenes Greer Foundation, congratulated the award recipients and praised the impact of their work on the future of allergy medicine.
According to Pezziardi, the selected researchers embody the foundation’s mission of supporting innovative scientific research that also delivers meaningful benefits for patients living with allergic diseases. He emphasized that the awarded projects contribute not only to scientific progress but also to improving the quality of care and treatment opportunities available to allergy patients worldwide.
The Foundation’s Scientific Board also highlighted the exceptional quality and diversity of the selected projects. The awarded research spans several important areas of allergy science, including next-generation therapeutics, advanced diagnostic tools, immunological mechanisms, and patient-centered healthcare approaches.
The Stallergenes Greer Foundation expressed gratitude to all researchers who submitted applications for the 2025 awards and acknowledged the contributions of the Scientific Board members involved in the evaluation and selection process.
As allergy prevalence continues to rise globally, initiatives that support scientific innovation and collaborative research are expected to play an increasingly important role in advancing understanding of allergic diseases and improving patient outcomes. By recognizing promising researchers and funding high-impact projects, the Stallergenes Greer Foundation aims to encourage continued progress in allergy science and support the development of more effective, personalized, and accessible approaches to allergy care.
About the research projects
Alexander Eggel’s research seeks to enhance both the diagnosis and treatment of allergic diseases through a translational and patient-centred approach. His team has developed a novel ex vivo mast cell activation test capable of accurately assessing allergen-specific responses from patient samples, offering a safer and more predictive alternative to conventional diagnostic methods.
In parallel, his work on next-generation anti-IgE biologics (Effector Cell Response Inhibitors; ECRIs) introduces multifunctional therapies that rapidly disarm allergic effector cells in three ways: prevent binding of free IgE, actively remove precomplexed IgE from its high-affinity receptor, and down-regulate IgE receptor levels. Together, these innovations aim to improve precision, safety, and efficacy in allergy management.
Janice A. Layhadi’s research aims to better understand the biological mechanisms underlying allergen immunotherapy (AIT) through advanced multi-omics approaches. By integrating single-cell Stallergenes transcriptomics, epigenetics, and proteomics, her work identifies key cellular pathways involved in immune tolerance and distinguishes responders from non-responders to treatment.
Her discovery of regulatory innate lymphoid cell subsets and associated signalling pathways provides valuable insights for the development of predictive biomarkers. Ultimately, her research supports more personalised, targeted, and effective allergy treatments, addressing unmet needs in diseases such as allergic rhinitis.
