We Can Apparently Edit Dogs Now

A Scientist Was Allergic to Dogs, So He Edited One

There are now two genetically edited beagles designed to make people sneeze less. They are called Bailey and Alfie, which somehow makes the whole thing stranger.

Matt Walker had a fairly common problem: he loved dogs, but his immune system thought dogs were a biological attack.

Being around them could leave him sneezing, itching and covered in rashes. His family even had a goldendoodle, one of those curly-haired dogs people will confidently tell you is hypoallergenic while it is actively making your eyes swell shut.

It still set him off.

Most people would take the hint. Maybe get a cat. Buy antihistamines in industrial quantities. Become the slightly sad uncle who makes a huge fuss of everyone else's dog and then immediately goes to wash his hands.

Walker, however, is a geneticist.

So he took a different approach.

He changed the dog.

And that is how we have ended up with Bailey and Alfie, two beagles born in September 2024 after scientists deliberately altered their DNA to stop them producing one of the main proteins responsible for dog allergies.

Bailey now lives with Walker.

She sits on his lap, plays with him, gets fed peanut butter and generally goes about her life as a perfectly normal beagle, blissfully unaware that she exists because one bloke's immune system was being difficult.

I love this story.

You probably aren't allergic to dog hair

Before getting into the bit where scientists start editing beagles, there is something I apparently should have learned years ago.

Dog hair isn't really what you're allergic to.

The actual trouble comes from proteins produced by the dog, which find their way into saliva, skin flakes and fur. The fur then does an excellent job of distributing everything around your house, so naturally it gets the blame.

Scientists have identified several dog allergens. One of the main offenders is a protein called Can f 1, which triggers reactions in a large chunk of people with dog allergies.

This also means the whole idea of a "hypoallergenic dog" is a little shakier than the £2,800 cockapoo industry might like you to know.

Some breeds shed less, which can make them easier for certain people to live with, but they haven't been granted diplomatic immunity by the human immune system. They still produce allergens.

Walker knew this because, unlike me five minutes before reading about him, he actually understands genetics.

He'd worked with CRISPR, the gene-editing technology that lets scientists make very precise changes to DNA. In 2020 he co-founded Kindred Companion Sciences and started working on a wonderfully direct question:

If Can f 1 causes the allergy, why not make a dog that doesn't produce Can f 1?

There must have been a meeting at some point where somebody said this out loud and everyone else just carried on as though they weren't discussing the prospect of creating a custom dog.

Making Bailey was considerably more complicated than ordering a cockapoo

The researchers started with skin cells from a female beagle.

Using CRISPR-Cas9, they altered the gene involved in producing Can f 1. The change was tiny, effectively breaking the genetic instructions so the cells could no longer make the protein properly.

Job done, except at this point they had successfully created some dog skin cells.

A pet consisting entirely of edited skin cells has limited appeal.

To get from there to Bailey, they used cloning.

They took the nucleus from one of the edited cells, put it into a dog egg whose original nucleus had been removed, and used that to create an embryo. It's the same broad method scientists used to create Dolly the sheep back in the 1990s.

Twenty-five embryos went into a surrogate beagle.

Two puppies came out.

Bailey and Alfie.

That's a sentence worth sitting with for a moment. These two dogs were cloned from genetically edited cells because somebody wanted to see if we could make dogs more compatible with people who are allergic to dogs.

And after all that, they just look like beagles.

No glowing eyes. No suspicious intelligence. No ability to open doors.

As far as anyone can tell, they're mostly interested in the same things every other beagle is interested in, which I assume are food, smells and completely ignoring whatever you have just asked them to do.

Then someone had to lick the science

Not literally.

Although, given this experiment involved dog saliva, we're not far off.

The researchers checked Bailey and Alfie's DNA to make sure the intended edit was there and looked at likely places where CRISPR might accidentally have changed something else. They didn't find unintended alterations in the sites they tested.

Then they collected saliva and dander from both dogs and looked for Can f 1.

They couldn't detect it.

Samples from ordinary dogs still contained the protein, including dogs from breeds commonly recommended to allergy sufferers.

That's good evidence that the genetic edit did what it was supposed to do, but a laboratory result only gets you so far. If you're claiming to have made a dog for allergic people, eventually you need an allergic person.

Fortunately, the project already had one lying around.

Walker underwent a skin-prick allergy test using material from Bailey and Alfie alongside samples from normal dogs. His skin reacted to the normal dog samples and didn't react to the edited beagles.

So he did what any responsible scientist would do after getting a promising result.

He took the experiment home.

Bailey has now lived with him for well over a year. He pets her, plays with her and lets her sit on him, all the normal stuff that previously caused him problems.

He says he hasn't had an allergic reaction to her.

He still reacts to other dogs, so this isn't a case of his allergy mysteriously disappearing halfway through the study. His immune system remains perfectly capable of kicking off when presented with a standard dog.

Bailey just seems to get through security.

There is something deeply funny about the amount of science required to reach such an ordinary scene. Years of genetics research, CRISPR, cloning, embryos, laboratory testing and God knows how much money, and the final result is a bloke sitting at home feeding peanut butter to a beagle.

Which, to be fair, is a pretty good result.

Before you order one

We haven't actually defeated dog allergies yet.

There are only two genetically edited beagles, and the published human testing so far is tiny. Can f 1 is also only one of several proteins that can cause dog allergies, so someone who reacts mainly to another dog allergen could meet Bailey and immediately start sneezing anyway.

Bit awkward after you've spent biotech-dog money.

Kindred isn't selling them at the moment, and the company still has regulatory hoops to get through before this becomes something ordinary people can buy. Bailey and Alfie also need monitoring as they get older, because they're approaching their second birthday and nobody has yet watched a Can f 1-free dog live to fifteen.

So far, both appear healthy and have developed normally.

That's reassuring. I still wouldn't want "the first two haven't exploded" to be the entire safety case.

The genuinely interesting question comes afterwards anyway.

Assume this works. Assume the dogs stay healthy, the allergy reduction holds up in larger studies and regulators eventually approve it.

What else do we start changing?

Humans have been altering dogs for thousands of years through selective breeding. We took wolves and, through an extremely long series of questionable decisions, eventually produced the dachshund.

So modifying dogs to suit us isn't exactly new.

CRISPR makes the request considerably more specific.

Don't like shedding? Perhaps there's a gene for that.

Want less slobber? Someone will ask.

A dog that stays tiny forever? There is absolutely a market for that, and Instagram will make sure every one of us knows about it.

Eventually someone will ask scientists to make a Labrador that can walk past an unattended sandwich without eating it, at which point I expect the entire genetics profession to admit defeat.

There are more serious uses too. A person who relies on a guide or assistance dog but suffers from severe dog allergies could benefit enormously from an animal designed not to trigger those reactions.

Then you hit the uncomfortable bit.

Rescue centres are already full of dogs.

If gene-edited pets eventually become a premium product, you could end up with people spending thousands on a made-to-order puppy while perfectly healthy dogs sit in kennels waiting for homes. It doesn't mean the science shouldn't exist, but it does make the future pet market look slightly weird.

And I suspect "slightly weird" is doing a lot of work there.

Anyway, Bailey exists

That still gets me.

A man wanted a dog and couldn't comfortably live with one, so rather than accepting defeat he helped create a dog his immune system wouldn't object to.

Bailey now wanders around New York being a beagle.

She doesn't know she's genetically edited. She doesn't know she's a clone. She definitely doesn't know there are scientific papers about her saliva.

She probably knows where the peanut butter is kept.

And somewhere in all of this is a version of the future where buying a dog includes choosing things humans have never previously been able to choose.

That future might be years away. It might turn out that removing Can f 1 isn't enough for most allergy sufferers, or regulators might decide the whole thing needs much more testing before anyone starts producing CRISPR cockapoos.

For now, we have Bailey and Alfie.

Two ordinary-looking beagles created in one of the least ordinary ways possible, all because a scientist was allergic to dogs and apparently refused to take no for an answer.

Fair play, really.

ManBrain thought of the week: “If your solution to a dog allergy involves cloning, you may have overengineered the problem.”