Nexvax2 – promising vaccine to cure coeliac disease

By Petr Čvančar | 2018-11-08

The End of Gluten Free Diet?

Nexvax2 is promising vaccine to cure coeliac disease. It is currently the only vaccine in clinical trials with a high potential to actually cure coealiac disease (CD). To be clear it will cure the CD with a genotype form of haplotyte HLA-DQ2.5. About 80% – 90% of patients with coealiac disease have this genotype. To cure the CD thus means that patients become gluten tolerant again, without the need of any gluten free diet. This is really cool! The principle of the treatment is based on reprogramming T-Cells, the cells of the immune system, and their response to specific peptides of the gluten protein.

The very first phase of the clinical trial on a small scope of patients confirmed the positive effect and safety of the vaccine. Volunteers were vaccinated for a couple of months and then they could eat normally. The gluten free diet wasn’t followed. After a couple of months the effect was confirmed by the small intestine biopsy.

Thanks to the success of the first phase the clinical study continued to the second phase. The study in New Zealand is fittingly named Biscuit (Reset) Study. In this randomized phase of the study hundreds of volunteers in Australia, NZ and the US will be injected with placebo or vaccines twice a week for four months. Usually the second stage of clinical trials determines the medicine’s effect and safety using a larger sample of patients while lasting a couple of years. This will be followed by the third phase which will determine the medicine’s dosage. This phase could involve thousands of patients and is predicted to be the longest, 5 to 7 years.

Uncertainty

A lot of progress has been made in the research of biological treatments of autoimmune diseases. So the question is not “will the CD be treatable” but “when will the treatment be available” and “how much will it cost”.

Web Resources

New Zealand clinical trial – Biscuit (Reset) Study

Clinical trial in the US – A Study of the Safety, Efficacy and Tolerability of Nexvax-2 in Patients With Celiac Disease (CeD)

Pharmaceutical company ImmusanT

The vaccine that could end coeliac disease

The wheat is over: World’s first vaccine for people suffering with coeliac disease could end gluten-free diets

SENS Bars – Gluten Free – Lowcarb Highprotein Bar / Energy Bar

By Petr Čvančar | 2018-11-02

Since the beginning of my life with diabetes and coeliac disease, I’ve been looking for some healthy bars, tasty, filling snacks to eat that I will not force me to take a shot of an insulin bolus. That’s why the following parameters are based on my search for the ideal bars. I want bars from natural raw ingredients, without artificial additives, with a minimum of carbohydrates (as few as possible) and mainly without gluten. There are a lot of bars on the market made by different manufacturers, but all of those (at least the ones I found / tasted / saw) somehow did not meet my requirements. They either contain wheat, wheat pulp or milk protein, e.g. Myprotein Mybar ZERO made me feel as I were eating sticky dirt. Additionally, of course, they also contain lots of more or less artificial food additives, fully stiffened palm kernel grease, aromas, dyes, preservatives, etc. Given a choice I don’t want to eat any of that. But there is an alternative. These are the gluten free SENS Bars you can choose. Low-carb high protein bars and Energy bars.

I don’t fear BUGS I EAT them

Once I visited an e-shop while ordering my favorite gluten-free “Wholebake Flapjack”, which I use to fight with hypoglycemia, I encountered an unknown SENS Bar. I looked up the ingredients and immediately got interested. I like to experiment and try new alternatives. And because I’m open-minded, an unconventional ingredient could not stop me from trying it. What is the unconventional ingredient? Try guessing. Chirr, chirr – Acheta domesticus.

I started with a bar of dark chocolate with orange flavor and I must say that it totally captivated me. So I did not hesitate and ordered a test pack containing 4 different bars. Two low carb protein bars with “Dark Chocolate & Sesame” and “Peanut Butter & Cinnamon” flavors and two energy bars with “Dark Chocolate & Orange” and “Pineapple & Coconut” flavors. The base common ingredient of all bars is cricket flour. Other ingredients are fabulous things, such as dates, agave syrup, chocolate, cocoa, cashew nuts, peanut butter, sesame, coconuts, oranges or pineapples.

Gluten Free

Since I am a celiac, in addition, symptomatic and sensitive to a contamination, it is absolutely necessary for me to know if a food is glutened. So I asked the producer about how they feed crickets and if the bars contain gluten contamination. I received the following very satisfying answer: “We do not feed the crickets with gluten. There is no way for gluten to get into a bar, whether from cricket flour or any other ingredient. The bars are gluten-free and meet the strictest criteria. We passed laboratory tests and received a certification. If we fed crickets with gluten, there would be traces of gluten, but we do not do it, and therefore it is gluten-free. Besides, labeling “gluten free” is on the packaging of the bars and we could not do it if we did not have the certification. We take the safety of our customers and clear labeling of our bars very seriously.”

SENS Bar - nutrition information — SENS Bar – nutrition information

Try it, Taste it

I firmly believe there will be a lot of like-minded people who will come around to the SENS Bar. Whether it’s a diabetic looking for a low carb snack or a coeliac or a wheat allergic who cannot get gluten. Anyway, I personally recommend you to try the taste of these nutritionally valuable and healthy bars. Get over the years of insect eating prejudices and order a special sample pack of all four species on the manufacturer’s website. And if it helps you to make the decision, there is a negotiated unique 20% discount for coeliac, wheat allergic, and diabetic people. The discount code is “SENS4DIETERS” valid until 12/31/2020.

https://www.sensbar.com/en/product/sample-pack

Month: November 2018