Walker is a geneticist and the co-founder of Kindred Companion Sciences. He and his team used CRISPR — the same Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing tool used in human medicine — to switch off the single gene in dogs responsible for producing Can f 1, the main protein that triggers dog allergies in people. They took skin cells from a beagle, edited that gene, cloned the cells, and used the edited DNA to create embryos. Those embryos were implanted in a surrogate beagle, who gave birth to two healthy female pups, Alfie and Bailey, in September 2024.

Lab tests found no trace of the allergen in either dog’s saliva or fur.

To confirm it in the real world, Walker underwent a skin-prick allergy test using samples from the two beagles. His skin didn’t react. As a control, the same test using samples from a poodle and a goldendoodle — breeds widely marketed as hypoallergenic — did trigger a reaction. Roughly one in seven people worldwide has a dog allergy, according to the research, which was published in The CRISPR Journal. This is the first time the approach has worked in a dog.

Walker didn’t introduce any foreign genetic material to pull this off. “This type of genetic change occurs naturally in dogs,” he said. “All we did was direct it at this specific site.” In other words, he didn’t invent a new kind of dog. He just aimed at a mutation nature was already capable of and made sure it landed.

Bailey lives with Walker in New York; her twin Alfie lives with Kindred’s co-founder in Florida. Neither dog is available to the public yet — researchers still need to track their long-term health and figure out how to make the process affordable before anything like this reaches a pet store. But for the millions of people who’ve spent their whole lives loving dogs from a careful distance, it’s the first real evidence that the distance might not have to be permanent.