Peanuts. Milk. Eggs. Words that trigger panic for many parents, teachers and kids. Today one in 13 children has a food allergy, a rate that increased 50 percent between 1997 and 2011. No one seems to know why.
But four moms in Boston are determined to find out. They've raised close to $10 million to launch a Food Allergy Science Initiative (FASI), based at the Broad Institute in Cambridge.
FASI aims to "tackle head on, the underlying biology of food allergy," said Ruslan Medzhitov, a professor of immunobiology at Yale University, who will lead the initiative.
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