The effort and expense to maintain the committee, which met only 10 days in the past 15 years, can no longer be justified, the FDA said. The terminated panel’s responsibilities will be integrated into the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

Expert panels may be used to help the FDA decide when and how a new biomarker could be leveraged for regulatory purposes. Participants at workshop on allergy and asthma biomarkers also discuss need for standardization of food allergy trials and new trial design approaches. 

Opportunity could knock for the smaller but more specialized players in the peanut allergy space now that Novartis has halted trials of its investigational IgE inhibitor ligelizumab.

Nestlé has finally divested the peanut allergy business acquired in 2019 to much fanfare after the treatment spectacularly failed to live up to its blockbuster potential.