FARE Clinical Network Frequently Asked Questions

The FARE Clinical Network is a group of top food allergy centers that is led and coordinated by FARE (Food Allergy Research & Education). There are 50 participating institutions across 23 states and the nation’s capital.

The FARE Clinical Network was established to:

• raise the quality of care for food allergic patients nationwide
• reduce discrepancies in care across providers
• make comprehensive care accessible and available for all food allergic patients
• investigate the biology of food allergy 
• develop new therapies and new diagnostics for food allergy

Food allergy centers in the FARE Clinical Network have participated in more than 45 clinical trials in food allergy, including the trials that led to the development and market release of an FDA-approved treatment for peanut allergy in January 2020. Investigations at the FARE Clinical Network sites continue to support the development of additional therapies, new diagnostics, and strategies for food allergy prevention and management. In addition, they have offered patient and community education and helped to educate a new generation of allergists/immunologists and other care providers in best practices for food allergy prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

In 2020, the FARE Clinical Network expanded to integrate and accelerate the search for innovative therapies, diagnostics and prevention strategies and to elevate patient care in new communities.

The expanded FARE Clinical Network will include three type of centers that draw on the individual strengths of each participating institution:

• Discovery Centers of Distinction will conduct novel research on treatments, diagnostics, prevention and improvements to care
• Clinical Research Centers of Distinction with expertise in leading clinical research will investigate new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat food allergy
• Clinical Care Centers of Distinction will provide exceptional patient care and community education while generating real-world data through daily clinical care

All three types of centers will provide optimal clinical care and community leadership on behalf of patients with food allergy. Discovery Centers of Distinction and Clinical Research Centers of Distinction will also participate in multi-center clinical trials and will help to train the next generation of investigators in food allergy. In addition, Discovery Centers of Distinction will develop and collaborate on translational research that will compete for outside funding. (Translational research is cross-disciplinary biomedical research that utilizes laboratory discoveries in clinical care to advance the development of treatments and improve patient outcomes.)

The goal of the FARE Clinical Network is to bring top institutions together to ensure that patients with food allergies have access to state-of-the-art diagnosis and treatment, short-term and long-term care, and research that addresses factors from discovery to application along the entire clinical and translational spectrum.

• Through novel basic and translational investigations, the expanded FARE Clinical Network will uncover key insights into the epidemiology, burden and biology of food allergy and will lay the groundwork for applying these insights to patient care. This cutting-edge research will attract new funding and talent to the field and bring food allergy treatment to the next level. 
• By increasing the locations available for multi-site clinical trials, the expanded FARE Clinical Network will facilitate the development of new therapies, diagnostics and prevention strategies and will make access to experimental treatments possible for volunteers drawn from a larger and more diverse patient population.
• In addition, all institutions participating in the expanded FARE Clinical Network will contribute to the development of the FARE Patient Registry and food allergy biorepositories. This combination of privacy-protected, HIPAA-compliant patient data and matched biological samples will greatly aid researchers in shedding light on detailed mechanisms of food allergy. These unique resources will ultimately help researchers and clinicians understand why food allergy outcomes vary so widely from one patient to another and from one reaction to another within the same patient.

Click here to find the FARE Clinical Network site nearest you. 

The FARE Patient Registry is a secure, health information database that allows food allergic individuals and their caregivers to quickly, conveniently and privately share their food allergy experiences in order to help advance food allergy research. As each patient’s food allergy experience is unique, the information shared helps researchers answer critical questions and deepen their understanding of this complex disease. The FARE Clinical Network sites help to enroll new participants into the FARE Patient Registry and in turn, provide investigators access to de-identified data stored in the Registry to further their research.

The FARE Data Commons will be a state-of-the-art, secure, centralized food allergy patient data platform that incorporates electronic data from the FARE Patient Registry, FARE Clinical Network, FARE Biorepository and other partnered data sources of clinical research, clinical care and patient data.   

The goal of the FARE Data Commons is to enable medical entities around the globe to share and access privacy-protected data in one common place (physical or virtual) and collaborate to drive research forward. 

The FARE Data Commons will: 

• Help investigators shed light on the causes of all food allergies, how the body senses allergens, which allergens cause reactions, why individuals become hypersensitive to foods and what causes variation among patients.  
• Make it easier and less costly to conduct new clinical trials; and  
• Create uniform standards for data capture. 

The FARE Clinical Network was launched in 2015 and initially included 22 centers of excellence in 15 states and the District of Columbia. Between 2015 and 2019, the network grew to include 33 food allergy centers, with participating institutions located in 19 states and Washington, D.C. In 2020, the FARE Clinical Network has further expanded to encompass 50 participating institutions in 23 states and the nation’s capital.