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Transgenic cats will help develop AIDS drugs
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
The feline AIDS virus is unable to penetrate the cells of transgenic cats supplied with a protective human protein.
Everyone knows that the spread of the AIDS virus has become an epidemic, but few have heard that there are two AIDS epidemics: one in humans and one in cats. The human virus is called HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), the cat virus is called FIV (feline immunodeficiency virus). The feline virus causes almost the same symptoms as the human one. FIV cannot pass to humans, and HIV cannot infect cats, but they are indistinguishable from each other in terms of basic molecular-biochemical parameters.
It is known that humans and monkeys have a special protein that prevents the development of the feline virus in the body of primates. This is TRIMCyp, it recognizes FIV proteins and destroys the viral membrane. The idea of researchers from the Mayo Clinic (Minnesota, USA) was to supply cats with the human TRIMCyp protein and thus make them resistant to the feline immunodeficiency virus. But how to achieve this? The only method that could be used to carry out such an operation has proven to be too unreliable and very complex. Its essence is that some new genes are added to the nucleus of a somatic (non-reproductive) cell, after which it is introduced into the egg. Although Dolly the sheep was once created using this technique, it only works in a small number of cases.
Therefore, another technique based on the use of a modified virus was chosen for cats. Since cat cells are more than accessible for infection with the immunodeficiency virus, which belongs to the lentivirus group, another lentivirus equipped with the TRIMCyp gene and the gene of the green fluorescent protein was used as a genetic “carrier”. The fluorescence could be used to determine whether the introduction of the new genetic material into the cat’s cells was successful.
The modified virus infected the cats' eggs, which were then fertilized and injected into the animals. A total of 22 cats were treated, each receiving 30 to 50 eggs.
Five cats became pregnant. Of the eleven embryos, ten had the genes for the fluorescent protein and TRIMCyp. Five embryos developed into kittens, one of which was stillborn, and the other died after birth. It should be emphasized that the success rate of 23% is much higher than the 3% probability when using the first of the described methods, with the transplantation of the nucleus from a somatic cell to a reproductive cell. The authors of the work also note the high percentage of pregnant cats and the high number of transgenic animals in relation to the total number of embryos. This is a truly major success in transgenic technology.
But the main result, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Methods, was that the animals were ultimately resistant to feline AIDS. When the researchers tried to infect the blood cells of the transgenic kittens with the FIV virus, they failed. Now the scientists will try to find out whether the animals themselves are resistant to the viral infection.
In the future, the researchers say, cats may displace mice as the most popular laboratory animals. For example, cats are better suited to studying the work of the visual cortex of the brain, since the latter is more similar to humans in this regard. Studies of other human antiviral proteins on "cat material" are also planned. As for the question of whether any cat protein can be mobilized to fight human AIDS, the researchers preferred to tactfully avoid it. Probably to avoid tabloid headlines in the spirit of "Cat people can defeat AIDS!"