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Matt Walker couldn’t pet a dog without sneezing—until he and other scientists used a gene-editing technique to produce a hypoallergenic beagle named Bailey.
Now, he can feed Bailey spoons of peanut butter while she lies on his lap and can play fetch with her in Central Park. His allergies didn’t go away: Bailey’s saliva and hair no longer contain a key allergy-causing protein.
“The feeling right now is sort of a mix of relief and awe and gratitude that it worked,” said Walker, a geneticist. His company, Kindred Companion Sciences, created Bailey and her twin Alfie using a Nobel Prize-winning technique called CRISPR.
It’ll take years before the millions who suffer from dog-related allergies can walk into a pet store and buy a pooch like Alfie or Bailey.
Scientists have to monitor the long-term health effects of the genetic tweak, and find ways to commercialize the approach to make it affordable. And experts not involved with the effort say it could hurt shelter and rescue animals waiting to be adopted.
“It opens the door to a lot more people being able to own pets. On the negative side, it may discourage people from trying to use strays and unwanted animals that are not engineered to be allergy-free,” said bioethicist Arthur Caplan with New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
Researchers have tried to create hypoallergenic pets before, mostly by using cloning. But this led to sicker pups that were too genetically similar. Two years ago, researchers used CRISPR to reduce levels of an allergy-causing protein in a cat named Alsik. But it’s not yet clear whether this technique is safe to be tested on other cats.
Dogs that shed less, like poodles, are often thought of as hypoallergenic. But these pups still produce allergy-causing proteins that end up in their saliva, hair, and dander, so they can still make people sniffly.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.