A new treatment for cat allergy sufferers may be available in a few years.

A team of six doctors at the University of California at Los Angeles has created a molecule, GFD, which combines the cat protein that triggers allergies with a human protein that stops the reaction, according to their research report published in medical journal Nature Medicine.

Injections of GFD successfully stopped airway swelling in mice that had been sensitized to cat allergies. In blood cultures from people who were allergic to cats, GFD reduced histamine release by more than 90 percent. Histamines are proteins commonly produced in allergic reactions.

“We made this molecule based on previous studies that we have done in our lab, showing that there are certain ways in which you can actually turn off the allergic response before it gets going,” said Christopher Kepley, assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and member of the research team.

Kepley worked with a team of five other researchers — Daocheng Zhu, Ke Zhang, Tetsuya Terada, Takechiyo Yamada and Andrew Saxon.

“A lot of people are allergic to cats, so we’re trying to make this molecule cat-specific, and that seemed to work with the mouse and in the test tube,” Kepley said.

Jay Brown, allergy specialist for the McFarland Clinic, estimates one-fourth of his allergy and asthma patients also have problems with cats.

“When people are allergic, their immune systems are interacting with something in the environment under the mistaken impression that it’s dealing with a parasite,” Brown said.

The main cat allergen is found in cat saliva, Brown said. It has digestive enzymes that remind the immune system of parasite proteins and cause the release of histamines.

Recent findings on cat allergies show that people will frequently have significant amounts of cat dander in their homes even if they do not own a cat, Brown said.

“Cat dander is so common in our culture,” Brown said. “It transmits presumably on people’s clothing from one place to another, so a lot of people with a cat allergy don’t even have a cat, yet they’re symptomatic in their own house.”

The most broadly used medicines for cat allergies are antihistamines, Brown said. Some allergy sufferers undergo immunotherapy, in which they are given allergy shots that start with tiny doses of the allergen and gradually increase exposure to desensitize their allergic response, he said.

“[Allergy shots] can cause significant reactions. About one shot out of every two million is potentially fatal, but if you do it in the doctor’s office, they usually do pretty well,” Brown said.

The UCLA team hopes to use the new GFD molecule as a safer and faster form of immunotherapy, Kepley said.

“Currently, there’s always a risk that if you inject the person with cat allergen that they could go into anaphylactic shock, so there’s a safety effect that we’re now going to overcome by fusing the cat allergen with an inhibitor molecule,” Kepley said.

“We think it will be faster because with the safety issue overcome, we think in theory that we will be able to increase the amount of antigen used in the vaccination.”

Based on studies with immunotherapy techniques, he said he predicts the injections will continue to prevent allergic reactions for up to a year after the last round of shots.

The treatment for cat allergies may also lead to treatment for other severe allergies, Kepley said.

“It’s really limited only to how well we can manipulate the allergen in a test tube. The immediate goal is to extend this technology to peanuts,” he said.

Kepley predicts that the injection will be available to the public in three to five years.