Having a severe food allergy is brutal. Up to now, all sufferers could do was practice total avoidance — bringing their own food to parties, begging airlines not to serve peanuts — and pray that they could whip out their epinephrine injector in time if something went wrong.

That’s why research sponsored by Aimmune Therapeutics and published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine caused a stir. Trials involving nearly 500 children with severe peanut allergies had successfully desensitised two-thirds of those who completed the trial. After one year of treatment, they could eat the equivalent of three to four peanuts.