An open R&D notebook for an anti-alpha-gal — the "antivenom" for the tick bite that makes you allergic to red meat.
v0.5 (alpha) · CC BY 4.0 · independent project · not medical advice
I'm not a doctor. I'm not a researcher. I'm not a biotech founder. I'm a 23-year-old from Wichita, Kansas asking questions out loud on the internet.
I have not been bitten by a Lone Star tick. I do not have alpha-gal syndrome. I just think it's wild that a single tick bite can take red meat away from someone for life, and I wanted to see what's actually being worked on to fix that — so I read the papers, organized what I found, and put it here.
This is not medical advice. This is not a treatment plan. This is not a clinical recommendation. Nothing in this repo should be used to make a real health decision. It is a hobby-grade literature review with an analogy and some opinions attached. Every claim links back to a paper or trial — go read those, not me.
If you actually have AGS, please talk to a real allergist. If you're a researcher and I got something wrong, please open an issue — I will fix it and put my mistake in the errata appendix on purpose, so other curious people can see what was wrong and why.
A Lone Star tick can bite you and install a lifelong allergy to beef, pork, lamb, gelatin, and sometimes dairy. NullGal is a public notebook mapping every plausible way to undo that, ranked by how close each idea actually is to a human treatment.
Think of your body as a house with a really aggressive security system.
- Alpha-gal is a sugar that lives on red meat. To a normal person's house, it's just a stranger walking past the porch — nobody cares.
- A Lone Star tick bite is what happens when a sketchy security installer comes to your house, points at that stranger, and tells your alarm system: "Hey, that guy? He's a burglar. Light him up every time you see him."
- After that, every time the stranger walks by (every time you eat red meat), the alarm goes off — hives, gut pain, sometimes full anaphylaxis. The stranger never actually did anything. The alarm was just trained wrong.
So now the question becomes: how do you fix a house that's been programmed to attack a harmless stranger?
You've basically got three options, and that's the entire NullGal roadmap.
You want to eat a burger this weekend. You're not trying to rewire the whole security system, you just want a quiet evening.
Options that already have human data:
- Take a pill that eats the stranger before the alarm sees him. Alpha-galactosidase enzymes chop up the sugar inside your gut so very little of it ever reaches the immune system.
- Cut the wire to the alarm bell for a few hours. BTK inhibitor drugs (a new one, remibrutinib, got FDA-approved in September 2025) silence the cells that actually ring the alarm. In a 2025 food-allergy trial, every single patient who took it tolerated their trigger food.
- Stand a guard between the stranger and the alarm. Anti-IgE shots (omalizumab, ligelizumab) absorb the false-alarm signals before they can reach the trigger.
Realistic timeline: 1–2 years to repurpose. Lowest risk. This is where any real-world relief comes from first.
You're tired of muting the alarm every weekend. You want a doorbell that just recognizes the stranger and doesn't bother the alarm at all.
- A friendly-recognition antibody. An IgG4 monoclonal antibody is basically a custom-printed ID badge that says "this guy is fine, ignore him." It grabs the alpha-gal sugar before the angry alarm-system antibodies (IgE) can. A company called IgGenix is doing exactly this for peanut allergy; Regeneron already proved the concept works for cat allergy.
- Vaccinate the homeowner against the sketchy installer. Yale researchers are building an mRNA vaccine that teaches your body to reject the tick itself before it can bite. No bite, no bad re-programming, no allergy.
Realistic timeline: 3–7 years. More complex, but the protection lasts months at a time.
You want the alarm to forget the stranger was ever flagged. You want to go back to being a normal house.
- Tolerogenic mRNA. A vaccine that does the opposite of a normal vaccine — instead of saying "attack this," it gently teaches the immune system "this is part of the family, stand down." Penn and Cincinnati Children's are working on exactly this for food allergies.
- Peptide-MHC nanoparticles. Tiny particles that find the specific overzealous guards and retire them. A company called Topas just hit Phase 2a in celiac disease with this approach.
- Hardest case — replace the security company. A bone marrow transplant literally rebuilds the immune system from scratch. In published cases, 94% of patients lost their allergy IgE this way. Brutal, but it works.
Realistic timeline: 7–15 years. The moonshots. But every single one has at least an early human readout in a related allergy.
Stack all three tiers as a single program. Use Tier 1 to live your life now, Tier 2 to durably protect, Tier 3 to finish the job.
Every component in that stack already has human data — just not in alpha-gal specifically. That's the gap. Nobody has aimed the full stack at this one disease. This notebook is the case for doing it.
NullGal-Notebook-v0.5.docx/.pdf— the full 22-page R&D notebook with ranked tables, simulations, and a citation index where every claim links to a paper or trialNullGal-One-Pager.md— the elevator pitch version for sharingsimulations.py— Python sims for protective effects, IgE decay over time, and a feasibility map of all 16 mechanismsresearch_rescue.md/research_prophylactic.md/research_curative.md— raw source notes per tierREADME.md— this file
- Patients & the AGS community — a clear, honest map of what's plausible, what's already in trials for related allergies, and what's still a moonshot.
- Researchers & allergists — every mechanism has a live citation. Argue with the rankings. Send corrections. Errata is public.
- Builders, biohackers, founders — fork it. If any tier interests you, the gap is just "point this existing tech at alpha-gal."
- Capital — three of the four top-ranked rescue/prophylactic ideas are already in human trials for other allergies. The reformulation work is tractable.
- Read it. Start with the one-pager, then the notebook.
- Argue with it. Open an issue. Wrong claims get added to the errata appendix.
- Fork it. CC BY 4.0 — copy, remix, build on it freely. Just keep attribution.
- If you're already working on any of these mechanisms — let me know. The goal is to point patients and capital at you.
Who wrote this: A curious 23-year-old in Kansas with no medical training, no lab, no affiliation with any university, hospital, biotech, or research group. Just somebody who reads papers on the side.
What this is: A speculative, independent, open R&D notebook. A working hypothesis document. A map of what other people — real researchers with real credentials — are actually working on, translated into plain English so the rest of us can follow along.
What this is not: Medical advice. A treatment. A clinical recommendation. A substitute for an allergist. A protocol you should try on yourself. A peer-reviewed paper. An endorsement of any specific drug, company, or approach.
If you have AGS right now, the standard of care today is still avoidance, an EpiPen, and a real allergist. NullGal is about what could exist in 1, 5, and 15 years if someone with the right tools aims at it — not what's available at the pharmacy tonight.
No affiliation with Diatom Sky, any university, any biotech, or any clinician. Released alpha — expect rough edges and updates. Released under CC BY 4.0 — copy, remix, correct, improve.
NullGal · a kid from Kansas asking questions · CC BY 4.0 · v0.5 (alpha)