#1,604 – Cat Allergy Vaccine

Owning a cat is great unless you happen to have a cat allergy, are married to someone with a cat allergy, or have any frequent house guests or visitors who have cat allergies.  Then owning a cat is a real pain in the ass, if you’re even able to pull off the feat at all.  Thankfully, there may be a solution on the horizon: a cat allergy vaccine that targets cats not humans.

Gizmodo explains:

“The vaccine doesn’t try to desensitize the immune system of people allergic to cats, as other existing immunotherapies like allergy shots do. Rather, it attempts to train the immune system of cats to go after a specific protein, or allergen, that they naturally produce called Fel d 1. It’s supposed to accomplish this trick by hitching a genetically modified version of the protein to a virus-like particle derived from a plant virus (only being a particle, it shouldn’t be capable of causing disease).

Some 90 percent of people with a cat allergy produce antibodies to Fel d 1. So if successful, the vaccine would basically turn cats hypoallergenic by greatly reducing the amount of Fel d 1 they make and eventually spew into our noses and mouths.”

Now if only we could do something about the movie Cats.

Is a cat allergy vaccine the Greatest Idea Ever?


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