Nestlé’s $6,000 Peanut Allergy Pill Has Been a Dud
It spent $2.6 billion developing Palforzia, but the treatment regimen proved too cumbersome for many prospective patients.
When Nestlé SA’s peanut allergy medicine first hit the market in 2020, Robert Wood, the director of pediatric allergy at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, started preparing to offer it to the children he treats. But Covid-19 soon derailed in-person treatment, so over the next year and a half Wood and his colleagues told some 1,000 patients about the new drug instead, suggesting they consider it when the pandemic abated.
Their responses came as a shock. Only six people were interested in a medicine that had been billed as a game changer for life-threatening allergies—the first of its kind to be cleared by US authorities. Three years later, Wood has yet to prescribe the drug, Palforzia, and he isn’t alone. Doctors and patients from California to Germany appear to be shunning the medicine in favor of the tried-and-true prescription for sufferers: simply avoiding peanuts and carrying an adrenaline injection for emergencies.