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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Roberto Garcia-Ibáñez, an allergist and the founder and CEO of Potens Allergy. The company offers his proprietary Circava System Therapy, an immunotherapy protocol that uses custom-mixed serums to treat a patient’s unique general allergies, allergy-related asthma, and atopic dermatitis, among other conditions.
Garcia-Ibáñez discussed the importance of innovating in the allergy treatment space—a specialty that he noted has seen little advancement or change in the last century.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about your background and work at Potens Allergy.
I am a physician, I’m an allergist and immunologist. For the last 20 years I’ve been toying with allergen immunotherapy because allergy shots are essentially, in my opinion, an archaic method. The most important observations that we had were in 2016, and that led to the current formation of the current protocol, which is associated with the circadian cycle of the immune system.
Potens Allergy came after the fact that this was a seminal discovery—accidental, serendipitous, as many things are in medicine. Once I started to look at the literature of how this works, I said, “This is interesting.” I talked with a lot of people who said to patent the protocol, and I started the process in 2017. The patent came through in 2020. We are now looking to have a patent for sublingual immunotherapy.
What’s the best change you’ve made or seen at a place where you’ve worked?
I have not seen that much change in the practice of allergy and immunology. The standard treatment is about 113 years old. No other specialty will say that. It has complications: As many as 30+% of individuals who receive allergy shots can have adverse events. If they rush it, like some allergists do—instead of giving them over six months, they bring the patients and give them three shots the same day, bringing up the dosage each time—those individuals can have up to 50% of adverse reactions. There’s mortality with this protocol.
That is why I’m doing this. It is so safe that we are now making it available to primary care doctors because as anticipated, there will be some resistance among my colleagues in allergy and immunology. Because I’m shaking the tree.
What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
How individuals with allergy symptoms improve quickly if I use my protocol.
We have a protocol that puts patients on a maintenance level of immunotherapy in weeks. I think it’s high time for an almost 113-year-old model to be replaced by something else.