Gene therapy produces long-term contraception in female domestic cats

Currently there are no contraceptives capable of producing permanent sterilization in companion animals. Spaying, the surgical removal of the ovaries and uterus, is the most widely used strategy to control unwanted reproduction in female cats.

For the first time, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a founding member of Mass General Brigham (MGB), and their collaborators have demonstrated that a single dose of anti-müllerian hormone (AMH) gene therapy can induce long-term contraception in the domestic cat, potentially providing a safe and effective alternative to surgical spaying. The research is published in Nature Communications.

In 2017, David Pépin and his collaborators were the first to publish the contraceptive potential of AMH in rodents.

The team then turned their attention to felines. To raise AMH levels in female domestic cats, the researchers created an adeno-associated viral (AAV) gene therapy vector with a slightly altered version of the feline AMH gene. Human therapies using similar AAV vectors to deliver various therapeutic genes have proven to be safe and effective and have been approved by the FDA.

"A single injection of the gene therapy vector causes the cat's muscles to produce AMH, which is normally only produced in the ovaries, and raises the overall level of AMH about 100 times higher than normal," says Pépin.

Image source: Philippe Godin & Marie-Charlotte Meinsohn. Created with BioRender.com.