Stephanie Leonard, MD, an allergy immunologist at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego, has dedicated a large part of her career to finding new treatments for kids with food allergies.
Avoiding common foods, such as peanuts, eggs or milk, isn’t always easy and can harm a child’s well-being. And for kids with severe allergies, a trace amount of a certain food can cause a life-threatening reaction.
Dr. Leonard knows this firsthand. She was diagnosed with a peanut allergy at just 2 years old.
“It’s said that a food allergy affects quality of life like diabetes does—it’s a chronic condition that you have to think about every time you put food in your mouth,” she says. “And even with taking precautions, sometimes accidental ingestions happen, so it kind of keeps you in a permanent state of thinking, Do I know for sure that something’s okay to eat.”
Dr. Leonard’s own allergy journey inspired her career path. She’s passionate about allergy immunology and advocates for allergy education and teaching parents how to keep their kids safe.
“Navigating restaurants, navigating travel, navigating schools—as the rate of food allergy increases, it becomes more important for us to have ways to manage them in public spaces,” she says. “There are a lot of things that I can teach from personal experience, and also from what I’ve learned in my training, to navigate these things and still live a full life even with a food allergy.”
She’s also paying it forward and working toward a cure.
In 2011, Dr. Leonard established the Pediatric Food Allergy Center at Rady Children’s. One year later, it became the first allergy center in Southern California to participate in groundbreaking food allergy clinical trials.
Today, Dr. Leonard and her colleagues conduct research to better understand food allergies and find new treatments. Currently, they’re participating in clinical trials that train the immune system to tolerate an allergen through exposure to small amounts. Rady Children’s also participated in trials that led to the first FDA-approved peanut allergy treatment.
“We’ve been a place where you can receive treatment that you can’t find anywhere else,” says Dr. Leonard. “Therapies that were once just in research, we’re now offering to our patients. And with the different therapies we have available, now we can personalize that for our patients.”