Allergic diseases affect an estimated 260 million people worldwide and develop due to dysregulated immune responses against harmless environmental antigens caused by a breakdown in immune tolerance mechanisms. Current standard-of-care treatments manage disease symptoms through nonspecific mechanisms impairing normal immune function, often leaving patients struggling with symptom management. Allergen-specific immunotherapies can modify the immune response by inducing tolerance, leading to long-term reduction or elimination of allergy symptoms. Recent advances in nanomedicine have opened new avenues of research to induce antigen-specific tolerance through the delivery of allergens alongside immunomodulators under controlled contexts. In this Special Report, we examine how nanomedicine and immunometabolism can be harnessed to develop next-generation therapies for allergic diseases. We first summarize current FDA-approved treatments and their limitations. We then discuss immunometabolic pathways that shape allergic inflammation and represent actionable therapeutic targets. Next, we review nanoparticle-based approaches designed to induce antigen-specific tolerance and highlight cutting-edge strategies that use metabolite-derived polymers for controlled immunomodulation. Finally, we offer a perspective on how integrating immunometabolism with nanomedicine may enable transformative therapies for allergic diseases and other inflammatory conditions. PubMed and Google Scholar databases were searched for relevant articles published from May 2003 to January 2026.
Dharmaraj et al. (Mon,) studied this question.