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People unjustly kept away from feline companionship due to an allergy are rejoicing this week, after news resurfaced of a potential vaccine that makes cats less able to cause allergies. But while this research is promising, a finished product won’t be available at least until 2022.
The vaccine in question is being developed by Swiss-based Hypocat and is the company’s lead experimental and namesake drug. This April, Hypocat published results from a study on the vaccine. And it’s this news that the internet has, for reasons lost to the void, started to buzz about again.
The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, details a very clever strategy to tackle cat allergies.
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).
Read more here. (Gizmodo)
The vaccine in question is being developed by Swiss-based Hypocat and is the company’s lead experimental and namesake drug. This April, Hypocat published results from a study on the vaccine. And it’s this news that the internet has, for reasons lost to the void, started to buzz about again.
The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, details a very clever strategy to tackle cat allergies.
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).
Read more here. (Gizmodo)
