Dr. Scott Commins

speaker

131 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Dr. Scott Commins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · How does a tick bite cause a red meat allergy? · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

So you can use Zolair broadly, and it's on label for alpha-gal syndrome.

We have a host of patients on it, probably nearly 100 at this point, and they do quite well.

You are on it all the time.

So the way it works is it binds IgE and over a period of months generally basically kind of renders you non-allergic.

So a small exposure, cross-contamination, that kind of thing doesn't cause a reaction.

Well, we'd love to have that.

Something like what we call oral immunotherapy or OIT for short, where you basically eat a tiny bit of the allergen every day to sort of desensitize yourself.

I think that's possible in the long term with alpha-gal syndrome, but we really struggle at the moment with...

What that should be, I don't think we should, at least based on the dietary guidelines that we're being told, the cardiovascular risk with red meat, I don't know that we should be feeding our patients or telling them every day, you have to eat a certain amount of beef.

I worry that in the long run, the cardiologist is going to come back to me and say, you did what?

But I think it's doable.

We just got to figure out the form of alpha-gal for that daily consumption.

Yeah, we are thinking about vaccines.

We need to know what that factor or factors are in tick saliva that really determine

could drive the immune response.

And I think once we know that, we can take an approach similar to what we do for, say, bee or wasp venom, where you can't prevent that first bad bee sting reaction, but then we put them on venom shots, and then future stings don't cause that allergic response.

So I think we could do that for the tick bite.

We just have to know what it is in the tick saliva that's the real trigger.

It seems to be emotionally different.

And I think part of that is most patients that I'm seeing these days, because I'm in the adult clinic, they're either adolescents or adults.

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