GOOD NEWS FOR CAT LOVERS WITH ALLERGIES

To be a sneezy cat owner, or not? That is the question that many allergy-prone folks ask themselves before taking the plunge and getting a feline friend.

We all want to stroke the lovely cat’s fur, but the sneezing and sniffles that follow are far from ideal.

If you are somewhere along this spectrum of pet owners, you may well know that the allergies one gets from a cat are not a result of the actual fur, but rather the protein called Fel d 1.

Cats have this in their saliva (and tears), which then gets everywhere from their constant licking.

This pesky protein is thought to cause 90% to 95% of cat allergies which may affect around 20% of people, reported Gizmodo.

At least it is a clear target for scientists, who have been working on a few ways to remedy this problem and bring to the world purely hypoallergenic cats.

Pet food company Purina released a Fel d 1-reducing line of products in 2020, while others have been working on a cat vaccine to train a cat’s immune system to reduce levels of Fel d 1 in their systems.

The discussion right now seems to be focused on a more cutting-edge approach, using the Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing tech, CRISPR to simply make cats with little to no Fel d 1.

Per The Daily Beast, researchers at Virginia-based biotech company InBio released a study that successfully used CRISPR to prevent cat cells from producing the allergy-causing protein without negative side effects for the cats.

Several studies have suggested that the Fel d 1 gene is not essential to a cat’s survival, providing the InBio researchers with enough of a go-ahead to hopefully give the world sneeze-less cats.

They used CRISPR to erase either the CH1 or CH2 gene of Fel d 1 (each encodes a protein that both come together to make the allergen) from the genomes of cat cells grown in the lab, disrupting Fel d 1 production without affecting the production and function of other proteins.

For future experiments, the researchers plan to delete both the CH1 and CH2 genes to confirm this prevents the Fel d 1 protein entirely.

Although, per Nicole Brackett, a research scientist at InBio who led the study, the idea is to eventually treat already existing cats rather than create hypoallergenic breeds from scratch:

“From a consumer/patient perspective, [creating hypoallergenic] cats would be largely cost-prohibitive,” Brackett said to Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News.

“We also think it would be more practical from a commercial standpoint, as well as more ethical, to develop a treatment that is administered to existing cats rather than breeding and selling allergen-free cats.”

Brackett and her fellow researchers are imagining a sort of shot that can temporarily shut down the Fel d 1 protein and can be easily administered at the vet.

But they’ll need to test that on actual cats first and not just feline genes.

Perhaps in the near future, allergy-prone folks will have more options than just Russian blue and Balinese cats to choose from.