by Koren Wetmore

A California firm hopes to use genetic engineering to put cats back into the lives of millions of allergy sufferers worldwide. Employing a process called RNA silencing, the company plans to disrupt the chemical signal that causes the cat's body to produce the protein Fel d 1, the most common allergen found in cats.

"We're doing this at the embryonic stage, literally with just a few cells. That tiny embryo is then implanted into a surrogate mother and a kitten is born 90 days later," says Simon Brodie, president of Allerca, a San Diego-based firm that proposes delivery of the first hypoallergenic kittens by 2007...

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