Feature
Target: Celiac Disease
Therapies aimed to complement or replace the gluten-free diet
Not many kids can imagine a world without cereal, pizza, or cookies. But these are just a few of the foods that Stanford University biochemist Chaitan Khosla has had to teach his 6-year-old son to avoid. The boy has celiac disease, an inherited immune disorder, and it has sentenced him, for life, to refrain from eating anything that contains wheat gluten or similar proteins in barley and rye. In the boy's small intestine, those grain components would trigger a chain of events that can cause bloating, diarrhea, and malnutrition. Without the restricted diet, the condition can lead to fatigue, migraines, dermatitis, anemia, and osteoporosis.
