Israeli AI predicts baby allergies before they appear

An Israeli digital health company using artificial intelligence to predict and prevent food allergies in infants is expanding its operations in Australia.

MyOr, founded in Israel and now operating subsidiaries in Australia and the United States, has built a prediction model trained on data from one million children.

The platform identifies the roughly 10 per cent of infants at highest risk of developing food allergies before any symptoms appear, then refers them for dietitian-led intervention that the company says can cut the rate of allergy development by 80 per cent.

“We have a database of million kids,” MyOr Board Chair Ariel Katz told The AJN.

“Based on the database, we’ve been able, using AI technologies, to develop a prediction model that we know to predict precisely who has the risk to develop food allergies.”

The platform uses a short questionnaire built around 20 independent variables covering family history, environmental exposure and infant skin biomarkers.

Parents complete the survey during early wellness visits.

Infants flagged as high-risk are referred to a dietitian, who guides parents through the early, gradual introduction of allergens, a strategy that international research has increasingly endorsed in place of the older approach of avoidance.

“According to the clinical trials, you can reduce 80 per cent of the risk of developing food allergies, there is no drug [as] efficient in this way,” Katz said.

The underlying technology was developed in Israel but validated in trials in Australia and the United States and has been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

In Australia, MyOr works with hospitals, and dietitian consultations referred through the platform are eligible for reimbursement.

Food allergies carry significant costs well beyond the immediate diagnosis, Katz said. Parents frequently need to interrupt work to manage their child’s condition, and a cluster of related atopic conditions often follows.

“It’s a huge cost because it’s not only the food allergy, it’s direct food allergies, all the what we call atopic marks, all the other diseases that are associated,” he said.

“If you are able to cut the disease in advance, it is much, much cheaper than to treat the disease.”

MyOr’s broader product pipeline extends beyond food allergies to atopic dermatitis, also known as eczema, and iron deficiency.

All are built on the same principle: predicting disease well before clinical symptoms emerge, then intervening through nutrition rather than medication.

Katz framed the company’s work as part of a wider shift the healthcare sector has yet to make.

While AI has reshaped finance, tourism and retail, he said, healthcare has remained stubbornly reactive.

“There are two industries that basically were not changing, one is the healthcare, and the second one is the education, and I think now is the time for the healthcare to change,” he said.

“The only way, in general, to change the healthcare space is to shift from being reactive to proactive. Always there will be people that are sick, but if you are able to shift, let’s say 20 per cent of the effort from reactive to proactive, you probably will reduce the reacting by 30 per cent.”

Katz drew on the World Health Organization’s three recognised tiers of intervention to explain where his company sits.

The first tier is treating existing illness, which is where most patients engage with the system.

The second is early detection through screening such as mammography or colonoscopy, which catches disease at an early stage but does not prevent it.

The third is primary prevention, before disease appears, which is the tier most vaccines fall into.

Vaccines, however, are administered universally. MyOr’s approach narrows that net to individuals identified as high-risk.

“What we do differently, and the only one in the world, we predict precisely who has the risk, and doing instead of using drugs, doing nutrition intervention in order to mitigate the risk,” Katz said.

Asked whether AI tools could outperform doctors in this domain, Katz said the potential was real, particularly because parents seeking guidance on infant nutrition often face two unsatisfactory options.

“You have doctors that give you one minute, and you have, from the other hand, you have social media that you are not experts, you don’t understand,” he said.

To bridge that gap, MyOr has built what Katz described as an educational dietitian network covered by insurance.

In the United States, the company’s main current market, MyOr is acquiring dietitian clinics and consolidating them into a national network. The Australian rollout is at an earlier stage, but the regulatory groundwork is in place.

Katz acknowledged the scale of the task ahead. “To make a transformation of the healthcare industry [is a] challenge, but we are making progress.”

He sees the project in larger terms.

“If you can predict accurately things like food allergies, then you save on healthcare in the long run by picking up issues much earlier on.”