My fellow cat allergy sufferers can relate to how much a sneezing fit can ruin a perfectly good day. Looking through an itchy haze of watery eyes is no picnic, either. My cat allergy relief of choice is a generic form of Zyrtec (cetirizine), which is taken in tablet form once per day. It generally fixes the problem, though I know there are people with cat allergies that manifest much more severely, and they have to seek alternative methods of cat allergy relief.

Allergy shots are nothing new, but in order to work, they have to be administered frequently over the course of several years. They also have the potential to induce some pretty lousy side effects, which can include difficulty with breathing, wheezing, irregular heartbeat, dizziness, chest and/or throat tightness, loss of consciousness, and, uh… death (yikes!).

Mark Larche, professor at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON, has been working on a cat allergy vaccine for the past decade, and he and his team have finally nailed it. This is a peptide immunotherapy vaccine that would initially have to be given four to eight times a year, but it’s been deemed effective and safe without the side effects of traditional immunotherapy regimens; tests to determine optimal dosage will soon commence with a larger test group.

Larche’s cat allergy vaccine was concocted by taking the protein secreted by cats that’s responsible for most allergic reactions and identified, with blood samples from allergic volunteers, the parts of the protein that activated a response from T-cells, which would be the harbingers of such an allergic reaction. The researchers were then able to synthesize these regions and distinguish seven peptides from them. “And those synthetic peptides are what we mix together to make the vaccine,” said Larche. “We picked the peptides that would work in as much of the population as possible.”

McMaster University and Adiga Life Sciences are currently working together on using similar peptide immunotherapy against allergies to mold, grass, dust mites, and ragweed.