Our Story

We are a group of parents united by a common mission: to cure the food allergies that threaten the lives of our children, and millions of others.

We met through shared experiences. Each of us has gone through the terror of watching our child have a life-threatening allergic reaction to a food that should be harmless—be it nuts, dairy, eggs, fruits, or legumes. And each of us has known the frustration of a lack of safe, effective options for treating—or even diagnosing—food allergies in our children.

That’s why we got together to do something about it. Through our own research, we learned what the key problem with food allergy was: we do not know the biology that underlies food allergies, making it virtually impossible to systematically develop effective treatments.

We organized a scientific symposium in Boston in the fall of 2015 to bring together experts to discuss the state of the field. That was just the start. In 2016, through our vision and philanthropy, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard launched the Food Allergy Science Initiative to tackle this challenge.

FASI is a community of scientists, philanthropists, advocates, and parents who are devoted to unlocking the basic biology of food allergy, and using our newfound knowledge to develop new diagnostics and therapies. We believe this is the beginning of a new era of rationally designed diagnostics and treatments—and that food challenges, allergen avoidance, and EpiPens will become relics of the past.

We hope you will join us.

• Christine Olsen and Rob Small, on behalf of Zeke and Aly
• Ellie and Brian Chu, on behalf of Dylan
• Karen and Farhad Nanji, on behalf of Sofia
• Lesley Solomon and Derek Hibbard, on behalf of Dillon