Crowdsourcing a cure for feline coronavirus
February 5, 2021 7:47 AM   Subscribe

Data from a sprawling, extra-medical experiment to treat cats infected with the usually incurable and fatal mutation of a coronavirus, feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), gathered through online groups with unapproved drugs has been collected with the goal "to get the citizen science out to veterinarians in the more trusted venue of a peer-reviewed journal."

In 2019, veterinarian Niels Pedersen at the University of California led a study of Gilead Sciences antivirals that found an 84-day course of GS-441524 cured 25 out of 31 cats. Though Gilead saw more risk than benefit in having their antiviral approved for veterinary use when it showed promise in humans, and a compound very similar to GS-441524 was eventually renamed remdesevir. Black market versions of the drug made their way to U.S. pet owners willing to pay hundreds of dollars to save their cats.
posted by gladly (9 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
My takeaway from this is mostly lots of uncharitable thoughts about Facebook.

Also, that is absolutely amazing and so, so heartwarming.
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:21 AM on February 5, 2021


While a potential cure is great news for cats (and their humans) I'm concerned that if gets a lot of publicity the scam artists will descend in droves. How is the average person going to be able to tell an unmarked bottle of GC/GS from sugar water?
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:25 AM on February 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


I think that depends on your definition of droves. The online FB groups have 20K people in them. One that references a specific brand-name treatment has 5.5K people in it. Their veterinarians can't prescribe or oversee the treatment with them. Ideally, moving the data beyond anecdote should help get an approved treatment that vets can use to treat their patients and take the drug off the black market.

I euthanized my 10-month-old kitten last April because he had FIP, and in some ways, I'm grateful that I never knew about this treatment and didn't have to decide how much I could spend on it.
posted by gladly at 8:43 AM on February 5, 2021 [2 favorites]


Aside from being in the general, broad category of coronaviruses, what, if anything, is the relationship between this and our current pandemic coronavirus, sars-cov-2 (which I read last spring can also infect cats)?
posted by eviemath at 9:29 AM on February 5, 2021


Two years ago we lost a kitten we'd had less than six months to this. (Cat tax - the great wizard cat Howl) His decline was rapid and possibly one of the most painful things I've ever been part of. All of the vets we talked to were very sympathetic but all we heard were different versions of "there's nothing we can do." It also surprises me when I mention it to anyone how it's something no one has heard of unless they've had a cat succumb.

The only good thing about it was that we ended up with two other kittens to fill the void. They're both sweet babies but we still spend an awful lot of time thinking "what if" and this is going to add to that. I truly hope it saves anyone and everyone from what we went through.
posted by librarianamy at 9:33 AM on February 5, 2021 [5 favorites]


My beloved two-year-old cat Janet was euthanized after FIP was confirmed in 2017. It was traumatic and unexpected and terrible; we had thought she was going to a specialist vet to be evaluated for what we figured was probably something like kitty IBS, and before we knew it, we got told: no, there is no hope; no, she will not survive this, she might hang on a little longer, but her quality of life is pretty bad.

It was a bad fucking day.

We barely afforded the $2000 the diagnostic surgery it took to verify that yes, it was really FIP, not anything else cost. I don't want to think about having to know her life could have been saved with five figures to draw on. But I hope this treatment gets serious research and a thorough analysis. FIP is fucking heartbreaking.
posted by sciatrix at 9:36 AM on February 5, 2021 [6 favorites]


Another kitten loss here. Little Franz, aged four months. In the space of a day he went from completely happy to obviously dying, and was euthanized when he crashed at the emergency hospital that night. I still remember his heartrending howls begging for the pain to stop. His four brothers are now all happy two-year-olds, two still with us at home, and two adopted away as a pair to another happy home. But there should have been five.
posted by notoriety public at 10:10 AM on February 5, 2021 [3 favorites]


Yeah sorry I don't mean to pile on this thread but I have a lot of FIP-related emotional baggage, too.

I'd had my cat for about a year when one day I came home to find he was coughing and wheezing. I thought he might have either a respiratory infection or something stuck in his airway. I took him to the vet, found out it was FIV, totally untreatable at the time. They had put him under anaesthesia to run tests, and I opted to have them put him to sleep without waking him up. I didn't even get to properly say goodbye.

It was a shock, to say the least. If I could spare future cat owners from having that experience, I absolutely would.
posted by ErikaB at 11:28 AM on February 5, 2021 [3 favorites]


I lost my first kitty to FIP. A number of years later, I rescued a stray off the street and the vet thought she had FIP. Thankfully she didn't. She went on to live a good life with another ESL teacher I knew.
posted by kathrynm at 5:45 PM on February 5, 2021


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