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 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 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.
To create Alfie and Bailey, scientists started in the lab. They edited the genetic code inside dog skin cells, switching off the main gene responsible for producing allergy-causing proteins. Then they transferred the edited genetic code into eggs that went into a beagle surrogate that gave birth to two healthy female pups in September ۲۰۲۴. Scientists tested their saliva and fur and didn’t find signs of the allergy-causing protein.
They also performed an allergy test, pricking Walker’s skin with extracts from Alfie and Bailey’s saliva and dander. His skin reacted to samples from a poodle and goldendoodle, but not from the beagles.
The research, published on Wednesday in the Crispr Journal, is the first time such an approach has been tried successfully in dogs.
Walker says all dogs have the same allergy-causing gene that was edited in Alfie and Bailey. Kindred Companion Sciences hopes to test the technique on other dogs and service animals to see if they can breed an allergy-free line of pups beyond beagles.
Future research should test the gene-edited hypoallergenic dogs on more people with pet allergies to be sure they can soothe symptoms across a broader swath of the human population, said Dr Jeff SoRelle, a pathologist at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Since the switched-off gene is the main – but not the only – allergy-causing culprit in dogs that was tested, “we don’t exactly know just how effective or broadly useful this could be for stopping dog allergy in humans,” said SoRelle, who had no role in the study.
Bailey lives with Walker in New York, and Alfie lives in Florida with another Kindred scientist. The edit made to their genes is rare but does occur naturally in some dogs, so Walker said it’s unlikely to have any negative effects on the pups. But it will still be important to monitor them at routine vet visits and make sure they stay healthy.
Walker has had Bailey for a little more than a year and says she’s become a member of the family.
Despite being a lifelong dog lover, his allergies kept him away from pups growing up. Even breeds that were supposed to be more hypoallergenic, like his family’s goldendoodle, gave him itchy eyes and painful rashes.
But he and Bailey can play tug-of-war together in his living room, and she snuggles at his feet to comfort him when he’s sick.
“It feels just amazing to get to have a dog,” Walker said.
