Celiac disease (CD) affects a growing number of individuals worldwide. To elucidate the causes for this increase, future multidisciplinary collaboration is key to understanding the interactions between immunoreactive components in
gluten-containing cereals and the human gastrointestinal tract and immune system and to devise strategies for CD prevention and treatment beyond the
gluten-free diet. During the last meetings, the Working Group on
Prolamin Analysis and Toxicity (
Prolamin Working Group, PWG) discussed recent progress in the field together with key stakeholders from
celiac disease societies, academia, industry and regulatory bodies. Based on the current state of knowledge, this perspective from the PWG members provides recommendations regarding clinical, analytical and legal aspects of CD. The selected key topics that require future multidisciplinary collaborative efforts in the clinical field are to collect robust data on the increasing prevalence of CD, to evaluate what is special about
gluten-specific T cells, to study their kinetics and transcriptomics and to put some attention to the identification of the environmental agents that facilitate the breaking of tolerance to
gluten. In the field of
gluten analysis, the key topics are the precise assessment of
gluten immunoreactive components in wheat, rye and barley to understand how these are affected by genetic and environmental factors, the comparison of different methods for compliance monitoring of
gluten-free products and the development of improved reference materials for
gluten analysis.