Idea: Hypoallergenic Cat

What’s Involved: Genetically engineering a cat that doesn’t have the gene that makes Fel d 1 protein, which causes the majority of allergic reaction. Once a colony of hypoallergenic cats is established, kittens could be bred using “traditional” methods.

Where We Stand: In 2006 a company called Allerca Inc. claimed to have bred the world’s first hypoallergenic kittens and Time magazine hailed them as one of the best inventions of the year.

But the company and its founder have been the subject of controversy, with the media and a dedicated website questioning whether the firm, now called Lifestyle Pets, really has sneeze-free cats.

But this is not the only company in the hunt for the hypoallergenic kitty. Dr. David Avner, an emergency room physician in Denver, has been working with molecular biologists on silencing the Fel d 1 gene for years, and so far has come up empty-handed.

This past summer his team thought they had successfully knocked out the gene, which could lead to the breakthrough they’ve hoped for.

While Avner admits to being “optimistic” in predicting when his company, Felix Pets, will have cats on the market, he says there’s little doubt that in 10 years, a hypoallergenic cat will be in people’s homes.

“Without question, someone is going to do it. It’s too obvious an application of the technology, and the desire for people to have allergen-free cats is too high for it to go unrealized.”

Idea: Herbal Tablets for Asthma

What’s Involved: The Antiasthma Herbal Formula (ASHMI) is a tablet containing three traditional Chinese herbs. A study of patients in China shows it improves lung function and reduces use of bronchodilators.

Where We Stand: Dr. Xiu-Min Li at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and her colleagues continue to study ASHMI in mice and people, comparing it to using corticosteroids. New, unpublished data show that eight weeks after mice stop taking the corticosteroids, their asthma symptoms return when they are exposed to triggers.

However, the mice on the herbal formula are still protected eight weeks later. Safety studies in humans have been completed, and Phase 2 efficacy studies are continuing.

One of the benefits to using ASHMI, instead of a steroid, is that there are fewer side effects, such as weight gain. However, Li says corticosteroids will be the standard treatment for asthma for years to come.

“The practical protocol will be to have a herbal remedy that will reduce the steroid’s side effects and help to maintain the protective effect,” she says.

Idea: Quick-Acting Allergy Shots

What’s Involved: Currently, immunotherapy to environmental allergies such as trees, grass, ragweed and cats, sometimes called allergy shots, requires numerous needles over several years. The shots also carry the risk of anaphylaxis in some individuals. Now, a few companies are developing therapies to make the treatment process far shorter and also safer.

In June of 2005, the smog hanging over downtown Toronto was so thick you couldn’t see the CN Tower from the mid-town restaurant where Sara La Rocque was waiting tables at an outdoor patio. That was when Sara, a 21-year-old creative writing student, quit her job to go home and strip wallpaper.

One day later, she couldn’t breathe properly. Although she had experienced asthma briefly as a child, this was different. It was like breathing through a straw. For most of the rest of the summer, as Ontario lumbered through a record summer of smog advisories, Sara stayed indoors. She was miserable.

It wasn’t until six weeks later that she could even walk around the block with the family’s golden retriever (she is not allergic to dog dander) or the Burmese mountain dog.

Sara’s pretty sure what triggered her condition, and it wasn’t the wallpaper: “My asthma is smog-induced,” she says. “I think that’s what caused it.” A few years ago, most scientists would have doubted her analysis. The common wisdom was that air pollution could only exacerbate symptoms in people already living with asthma.

But now, a handful of mavericks in the scientific world are building a case to prove Sara’s point – that pollution might not just worsen asthma, but cause it. Not that these asthma researchers can yet say how this might happen. That’s still under study.

When it comes to asthma, theories abound as to why it develops, starting with the hygiene hypothesis. This suggests that our urban society is too germ- and virus-free, causing the underworked immune systems of those who inherit the allergic tendency to react to proteins – such as inhaled pollen or dust mites – that should be harmless. The immune system’s over-reaction results in airway inflammation and allergic asthma attacks.

There are also new indications that antibiotics in early life and obesity may be contributing factors. But some scientists keep coming back to the relationship between asthma and air pollution, particularly to that dense layer of smog that blights our cities all too often in the summer.

Somewhere in that haze of pollution, they believe, lies an answer to the mystery of why asthma gets switched on with such frequency in the urban world.

Over the past decade, scientists have found compelling evidence that air pollution irritates the lungs and triggers attacks in those who already have asthma. Some research indicates it can also worsen asthmatic flare-ups to allergens such as pollen, dust mites or pet dander.

“Air pollution remains one of the most under-appreciated contributors to asthma exacerbation,” wrote George Thurston, an associate professor of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine, in a 2005 article in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

A classic instance: When a strike closed a steel mill in the Utah Valley for the winter during the mid-1980s, researchers found that admissions of children to hospital for asthma and pneumonia were cut in half – and they climbed right back up the following winter after the steel mill had reopened. That’s a vivid example of pollution’s effect on asthma, and there are plenty more.

Next Page: Proof from California

Using data accumulated since 1990, scientists in Hamilton, Ontario and London, England have been able to plot the spike on a graph at precisely 17 1/2 days after Labor Day. “If you look at the magnitude of the peak relative to the rest of the year, by 2004 it’s pretty much the same as it was in 1990,” says epidemiologist Neil Johnston, who along with colleagues at St. Joseph’s Healthcare, McMaster University, and Imperial College, has led this research.

The spread of the cold virus is the biggest driver of the spike in students between the ages of 5 and 15, but a number of factors contribute to it. “Kids get back to school and the guy in the next desk or the child they share a school bus ride with has a cold, and maybe they share a drink,” Johnston says.

“But it’s also a period when aero-allergens are at very high levels – ragweed and house dust mite. Then you’ve got the stress of the return to school, allergens in the classroom, and the likelihood that asthma is not as well controlled because kids have been well and their parents haven’t been giving them their [controller] drugs.

“You’ve got a multiple whammy, and that’s what drives the peak.”

There are two other related asthma “peaks”: one in pre-school children, who appear to catch whatever cold brother or sister brings home, since their spike is plotted at 19 to 20 days after Labor Day. For those 16 to 49 with asthma, their peak shows up one week after the big post-Labor Day surge among schoolchildren.

So how do you keep a child from becoming a statistic on Johnston’s graph? He says it begins with awareness and control and making sure asthma medications are up-to-date. Experts remind that your child’s school needs to have a copy of your child’s asthma action plan. If either the plan or the drugs need changes, see a doctor or specialist (respirologist or allergist) promptly. Experts also advise frequent hand-washing to stem the spread of infection.

Next: Mind Those Classroom Triggers