These amides conceptually can be formed from a fatty acid and ethanolamine with the release of a molecule of water, but the known biological synthesis uses a specific phospholipase D to cleave the phospholipid unit from N-acylphosphatidylethanolamines.
It was the group of the Nobel prize laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini who in 1993 first presented evidence supporting that lipid amides of the N-acylethanolamine type (such as PEA) are potential prototypes of naturally occurring molecules capable of modulating mast cell activation, and her group coined the acronym ALIA in that paper.