Wichita, Kan. - New research funded by farmers aims to breed a wheat variety for people who can't eat wheat and other grains, an endeavor that comes as wider consumer interest in gluten-free foods is booming.

The Kansas Wheat Commission is spending $200,000 for the first two years of the project, which is meant to identify everything in wheat's DNA sequences that can trigger a reaction in people suffering from celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder in which eating even tiny amounts of gluten - comprising numerous, complex proteins that gives dough its elasticity and some flavor to baked goods - can damage the small intestine. The only known treatment for it is a gluten-free diet, not eating foods that contain wheat, rye and barley.

Though celiac disease is four to five times more common now than 50 years ago, only about 1 percent of the world's population is believed to suffer from it, and just a fraction have been diagnosed. But the gluten-free food business has skyrocketed in the last five years, driven in part by non-celiac sufferers who are either intolerant to gluten or following a gluten-free fad diet because they believe it may help them lose weight or that it's somehow healthier.

Sales of gluten-free snacks, crackers, pasta, bread and other products reached $973 million in the U.S. in 2014, up from $810 million the previous year, according to a January report by consumer research firm Packaged Facts, which analyzed the sales of hundreds of explicitly labeled and marketed gluten-free products and brands at supermarkets, drugstores, and mass merchandisers.

Supporters of the Kansas research, though, say this isn't a way to regain market share.

"If you know you are producing a crop that is not tolerated well by people, then it's the right thing to do," according to the project's lead researcher, Chris Miller, senior director of research for Engrain, a Kansas company that makes products to enhance the nutrition and appearance of products made by the milling and cereal industry.

Gluten-free foods are a niche product, and in the broader context of the world's wheat markets, it is not a driving factor, according to Dan O'Brien, extension grain market specialist at Kansas State University. "I anticipate it will develop as a specialty market," he said.

The research, which began in July at the Wheat Innovation Center in Manhattan, Kan., is still in its early stages, with researchers extracting proteins from seeds of various varieties of wheat. Miller has yet to begin work combining the proteins with antibodies produced by the human immune system to test for reactions.

He also plans to examine the wild relatives of wheat as well as modern varieties, and will tap into a Kansas wheat variety repository that dates back to the 1900s in hopes of finding a variety - perhaps one that fell out of favor among commercial farmers - that might already be low in reactivity for celiac sufferers. Researchers hope to use that variety to develop a gluten-free wheat using traditional breeding methods.