Researchers from Kansas City University (KSU) have had great success with an antiviral treatment for feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) that blocks the virus from replicating and stops the progression of the disease.
Their results, recently published in PLOS Pathogens journal, showed cats that received the protease inhibitor avoided a near-certain death sentence and returned to normal within 20 days post-treatment.
Until now it was not clear whether an antiviral by itself could reverse FIP’s deadly progress.
“This is the first time we showed experimental evidence of successful treatment of laboratory cats at an advanced clinical stage of FIP,” study lead Yunjeong Kim, an associate professor in KSU’s diagnostic medicine and pathobiology department, wrote.
“We found that antiviral treatment led to full recovery of cats when treatment was started at a stage of disease that would be otherwise fatal if left untreated.”
Cats in the study had FIP experimentally induced in a laboratory setting. The next step will be to test the effectiveness of the antiviral in cats that have come by their FIP naturally.
Feline infectious peritonitis is a viral disease of cats caused by certain strains of a virus called the feline coronavirus. Once a cat develops clinical FIP involving one or many systems of the cat's body, the disease is progressive and almost always fatal. The way clinical FIP develops as an immune-mediated disease is unique, unlike any other viral disease of animals or humans.
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