About Us

What is a Food Lab?
Unique to the Southern California Food Allergy Institute, the Institute houses a one-of-a-kind food laboratory. Given the precise nature of TIP™, each patient requires very specific protein dose requirements, down to the milligram and microgram of protein.

How is it possible to measure these small doses safely?
The Food Lab is led by several food technicians who follow a focused design process which is geared to producing clean, cross-contamination free sources of food proteins including peanuts, tree nuts, seeds and more. After whole foods are processed utilizing processes to remove oil and fat, the remaining proteins are in modified powder form. These foods are measured individually, labeled, and packaged with expiration dates all at a patient specific level. Currently, the Food Lab produces over 30,000 doses of food protein every month! The hard work of our food laboratory technicians keep our TIP™ patients safe as they navigate the process of food treatment.

What is this food protein dosing process called?
The Gummy Gelatinization Process uses a series of food protein extraction methods that allow nut proteins to be produced into specific color and sized gummies. This process allows us to make large quantities of standard dose sizes with a high degree of accuracy.

What is in the Gummies?
Aside from the specific nut proteins, which are sourced from organic companies and prepared to avoid cross-contamination, the gummies only have gelatin, sugar, food coloring and safe preservatives to give the doses a shelf life of 8 to 10 weeks. The gelatin is beef-based.

What is the Diagnositics Lab?
The Southern California Food Allergy Institute is proud to have established its own food allergy diagnostics laboratory, Foundation Labs. Housing over 3 tons of laboratory equipment, Foundation Labs received federal CLIA and COLA certification in December 2018. Southern California Food Allergy Institute patients now can undergo complete biomarker analytics utilizing our own federally-regulated facility.

This unique laboratory offers the ability to run biomarkers not available at other facilities which reflect the immune system's response to various food proteins. With increased efficiency and an ability to receive blood samples from other states, Foundation Labs will help patients all over the U.S. and the world receive cutting edge TIP™ therapy.

What is SLIT?
SLIT stands for Sublingual Immunotherapy. It treats the underlying cause of allergic reactions and is designed to gradually desensitize the immune system to specific environmental allergens. If your child is instructed to enroll in SLIT prior or during the Tolerance Induction Program™, it is a requirement if you wish to continue TIP™.

Why does my child need to enroll?
Environmental allergies share biosimilar proteins as food allergens. In order to treat certain food allergies, environmental allergies need to be treated as well. Our unique formula is TIP™-driven, created with extensive research by our founder Dr. Randhawa and designed for our patients in TIP™. In addition, your child will also gain relief from pollen allergies including improvement in nasal, eye, and lung symptoms. The typical treatment duration of SLIT is 2 to 3 years. However, the duration of SLIT therapy is patient-specific and may be longer or shorter.

What is Tolerance Induction Program™?
Southern California Food Allergy Institute is built on molecular data. As of June 2020, the Institute has stored over a trillion data points from anaphylactic patients in TIP™. This non-identified data, housed with secure strategies, is utilized to support vector machine analytics. In short, the data collected allows analytics to be conducted on a weekly basis for new patients arriving at the Southern California Food Allergy Institute. The more data points we collect, the more intelligent our machine analytics becomes. The use of this data helps predict how food allergy patients will respond to certain aspects of treatment and the predictive aspect of this data promotes safety. In the near future, the data analytics approach will be modeled into machine learning software allowing for increased speed and automation of this process.

How does Studio Kitchen help me?
The Studio Kitchen was created to take the fatigue out of TIP™. We understand how stressful the program can be for the parents tasked with making sure our patients eat what is required each day. In order to relieve that stress, the Studio Kitchen is working to help provide recipes, suggestions, video how-tos, and tips while in treatment. The Studio Kitchen is also where we hold monthly celebrations where families who are in-clinic for an appointment can decorate allergy-free cookies, sometimes for the first time in their lives.