This may well be the best news I’ll ever give on this blog – if you love cats (like I do), and if you are allergic to them (like many are). It seems that the first commercially available hypoallergenic cat is now being shipped (or whatever you do to get new pets to customers). I learned from the journal Nature that Allerca, a company based in San Diego, California, is selling the cats. They are already taking orders for deliveries next year. (They’re only $4000. Huh.)
Amusingly, these cats were discovered by accident. The company (among several others) were trying to make their fortune by trying to figure out how to modify the genes of more standard cats to suppress the production of the protein Feld1 that is responsible for the allergic reaction. While doing this, they stumbled upon a cat that already was not producing that protein, having a slightly different one in its place.
Sheldon Spector, a clinical allergy expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, recruited ten allergic volunteers, blindfolded them, and exposed them to Joshua, a regular cat named Tiki, or a furry dummy cat. Subsequent diaries of their symptoms suggest that Joshua was more allergy-friendly than Tiki.
(I have two questions here: Why did the dummy cat not get a name, and -more importantly- what self-respecting cat lover, even if blindfolded, cannot tell a furry dummy cat from a real one? They might as well have used a dog! 😉 )
In a section of the article predictably called “Cat Fight”, they also discuss the fact that there are rival researchers who have called this all into question. You see, Allerca have not published any of these data, and others don’t beleive that there is any such thing as a naturally occurring non-allergy-inducing cat.
David Avner, founder of Felix Pets in Denver, Colorado, which is attempting to use genetic modification (GM) to create low-allergy pets […] says that Allerca should publish data showing whether or not proteins from the cats’ skin and hair bind to human antibodies in the test tube, a process that underpins the allergic reaction.
That would indeed be the thing to do, so let’s not get our hopes up too much. Part of the response from Simon Brodie, the founder of Allerca is:
[…] there’s no substitute for real-life experience, and that trials with human volunteers have been successful. “It’s all well and good to do these things in the test tube, but we want to make it as real-life as possible,” he says. “We don’t have the data yet, but we do know the animals work.”
And the article ends with this final comment from him:
“If these scientists are sceptical, and if they happen to be allergic themselves, I would say ‘come and hold one of our cats’,” he says.
Now don’t you wish you could use that as part of the defence of your own work? Try it “just come and hug my spectrometer if you don’t believe me…”, or “Rub my equations against your cheek a few times, and you’ll see what I’m talking about…”
–cvj
I am allergic to cats, but I love them too. Breeders have been working on that for a while. At one point I was offered a cat which the breeders said was non-allergenic. It was a “Rex” cat which has very short, curly fur rather than the usual cat texture. I turned it down because (I didn’t say this to the breeders) it was so ugly. There are also bald cats (the “Sphynx” breed) but they are even uglier. I think people should tinker with allergies, not with the cats.