Angelica was a natural mink Tonkinese cat dearly beloved of Mr. Wayne Carr, from the USA. When Angelica died, Mr. Carr made a generous donation to my research into feline coronavirus and feline infectious peritonitis (FIP).

Donations for FIP research will be used for the following:

To buy the chemicals needed to do the experiments to discover more about natural feline coronavirus infection and FIP.

To follow naturally infected cats and, with the help of their humans, eliminate this virus from the cats. This will involve taking samples of faeces, saliva and occasionally blood.

To perform post mortems on naturally infected cats who have partaken of surveys or treatment trials and to then cremate their bodies and return the ashes to the people who loved them.

To do a properly controlled international study of different FIP treatment protocols, (this will cost several thousand pounds and I’d need to employ a veterinary PhD student to help with the work).

Please note my research involves only naturally infected cats, not experimental cats or experiments on any other kind of animals.

Donations so far have enabled the purchase of a PCR machine and -80oC freezer, have funded a study on the effect of commercially available cat litters against feline coronavirus. To read more about how I use your money, download my newsletters:

Click here to download the January 2005 newsletter.

Every so often, people ask how to make a donation to FIP research. If you would like to make a donation, you may now do so using PayPal.

Use this button to make a donation in Pounds Sterling -

Use this button to make a donation in US dollars -

Use this button to make a donation in Euros -

If you prefer to make a postal payment, please send a cheque made payable to the University of Glasgow Finance Committee Account and accompany it by a short note expressing that you desire the money to be used in FIP research.  

Send your letter to:

Dr Lesley Nicolson
Institute of Comparative Medicine
University of Glasgow Veterinary School
Bearsden Rd
Glasgow
G61 1QH
UK

If you are a British taxpayer, please print off and send in a gift aid declaration form, which will add to your donation: we can claim back 28p for every pound donated.

Please indicate whether you would like your name to be added to the list of donors (you might like to include your web site URL). Please tell me if your donation is in loving memory of a cat who was special to you, and whether or not you’d like his or her name mentioned on the site. To put a memorial on the internet for a cat who has died of FIP, please see the Orion Foundation web site's beautifully constructed and heart-rending memorial pages.
   

Harvey

Research Funding

Funding for FCoV/FIP research is very difficult to find and I am immensely grateful to those generous individuals who have given what they can for research and to the Morris Animal Foundation who are funding a project I am currently working upon with my colleagues at the University of Glasgow Veterinary School.

The sort of projects I would like to undertake are:

to find a definitive FIP diagnostic test
to examine the immune response closely to determine the best intervention for vaccination
to find a therapy to help cats stop shedding FCoV
to conduct clinical trials of possible cures for FIP
to conduct clinical trials for a possible preventative of FIP in healthy infected cats

I refuse to experiment on cats, so all my FIP research has been done on naturally infected cats.  I would like to dedicate this website with gratitude to the many people and cats who volunteered to be part of my research surveys.  I thank the Wellcome Trust, Cats Protection, the Robert Daubney Fund of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the Clinical Studies Trust Fund, the Feline Virus Unit, the Winn Foundation, the Orion Foundation, the Morris Animal Foundation and many individuals for funding my research in the past.  

What have I done with your donations and grants?

Cat litter to reduce FCoV infection: funding from this website enabled a comparison of cat litters for anti-coronavirus activity, I found that commercially available cat litters had widely differing abilities to neutralise coronavirus in the laboratory - but would they make any difference in the field? Choosing a litter which had coronavirus activity and subjectively was assessed to track less than most litters, a preliminary study is underway to assess whether the litter can affect virus transmission in a real life situation.

Carrier cats: people whose cats were identified as healthy lifelong carriers kindly allowed me to post-mortem the cats when they died. I have been looking in the tissues of these cats to locate the virus, this work is ongoing. I am grateful to Fermin Simons of the University of Utrecht for his help and advice in this.

FCoV resistant cats: the Orion Foundation funded preliminary work looking at the genes which govern immunity in the cat, this pilot study was published in the April edition of JFMS 2004. On this occasion, no marker was found, though interesting differences in the numbers of these genes was found in different cat breeds.

Funding acknowledgements

Thank you to the Devon Rex Breed Club of America for a big donation in April 2006 and the Siamese and Oriental Online Club for raising money in June 2006! Thank you Susanne, for your fundraising website, FIP Support, and the fantastic donations you have made in 2005 and 2006!

I am grateful to the Morris Animal Foundation for funding a project to attempt to identify unique markers of coronavirus infected cells. I am especially grateful to Pfizer for a generous donation of $25,000 which enabled me to take on an assistant part-time for one year (2004). I am grateful to the Winn Foundation for a grant which allowed 5 months of research into carrier cats in 2003. I am also extremely grateful to the Orion Foundation for moral support (thank you Mel Amundson and Pat Klein), and for a huge donation of almost $13,000 in 2003! Thank you Orion! Many thanks also to individuals and the Scottish, Northern Counties and Yorkshire Cat Clubs who made donations in 2005 and 2003. Thank you to all donors for your generosity. Thank you to Lorraine Twyman and the Norsk Skogkattring for setting up an internet auction (see the lovely certificate they sent). Thank you Dorothy, for your wonderful contribution of getting people to sponsor you during Lent. Thank you to the anonymous donors - you know who you are - who have been so very generous.

paragliding

20 May 2008

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