Matt Walker has always been allergic to dogs. He is also a geneticist, and he works at a company called Kindred Companion Sciences that set out to solve precisely that problem with the most precise tool available today: CRISPR.
His team took beagle skin cells and deactivated the gene that produces the main protein responsible for allergies. That edited material was implanted into eggs carried by a surrogate beagle, and in September 2024 Alfie and Bailey were born, two females genetically identical in every respect except that.
They tested the puppies’ saliva and hair: the allergenic protein simply did not appear. They gave Walker a skin test with extracts from a poodle, a goldendoodle, and the two edited beagles. His skin reacted to the first two. Not to Bailey or Alfie. Today Bailey lives with him in New York. Alfie lives in Florida with another scientist from the same team. But before imagining a hypoallergenic pet store, there’s one key warning: independent experts point out that this gene is the main cause of the allergy, not the only one, and that bringing these dogs to market is years away.
