The Food Allergy Institute is a JSC Impact client that provides the families of children with severe food allergies a path to “Food Freedom” through their Tolerance Induction Program™ (TIP), the first remission-inducing treatment for food anaphylaxis.
Led by Dr. Inderpal Randhawa, the Food Allergy Institute uses proprietary data and machine learning to create personalized and medically supervised treatment plans, achieving remission from allergy symptoms and the risk of anaphylaxis with a 99% success rate among children who complete the program. This innovative treatment is the first of its kind to give families and allergy sufferers the freedom to eat what they want, when they want, for life.
Embracing a hybrid model empowered Food Allergy Institute with the resources it needed to scale beyond its founding as a program of Dr. Randhawa’s nonprofit research institute for orphan diseases, the Translational Pulmonary and Immunology Research Center (TPIRC), a 501(3)(c) in Long Beach, California. Today its role as a commercial subsidiary allows FAI to operate in more locations, while also driving a share of profits back to TPIRC to fund new orphan disease research.
The JSC team worked with Dr. Randhawa and TPIRC to transition its food allergy program — then operating as the Southern California Food Allergy Institute — from a nonprofit division of TPIRC into a Delaware C Corp in which TPIRC is the majority owner. The other owners are Dr. Randhawa and a trusted set of private investment partners who knew the program and shared TPIRC’s goal to expand access to life saving TIP™ therapy in California, with the vision to eventually expand nationally and worldwide.
As a blended organizational structure — a commercial subsidiary owned by a US 501(3)(c) nonprofit — FAI can scale its growth and impact by accessing a wider spectrum of capital than is typically available to a nonprofit or for-profit operating alone. The JSC team supported FAI’s growth plan both by helping them plan their hybrid strategy, form a special purpose investment vehicle (SPV), and educate its supporters with new informational assets outlining the growth plan and the role for early-stage investors. The outcome is a hybrid organization with profitable commercial activities at two new sites and counting— all with a share of profits returning to the nonprofit as revenue for its research into therapies for more orphan diseases, including cystic fibrosis.
By harnessing the best attributes of for-profit and nonprofit funding models, the FAI–TPIRC hybrid is simultaneously powering innovative and personalized treatments for children facing severe food allergies, accelerating research into additional orphan diseases, and returning profits to the mission-driven investors who backed its growth — a virtuous cycle the JSC team is proud to help its clients achieve.