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Join Us in the Fight against FIP

The Whittaker Lab is dedicated to research that improves our understanding of feline infectious peritonitis (FIP).  Follow our weekly blogs, monthly case reports, and research updates from the lab.

We are collecting conjunctival swabs from sick and healthy cats to investigate new routes of FCoV transmission. Please email us at: fcovstudy@cornell.edu

Latest Updates

  • Still a bit of a work in progress, but the Cornell-based Nextstrain site for FCoV genome sequences  is looking good
  • November 18, 2025- Happy National Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP) Awareness, Research, and Education Day! FIP is so impactful that it even has its own national awareness day! Celebrate by spreading knowledge about FIP and reading our latest blog post about why continuing to “Fight FIP” is so important!
  • Cats and COVID, our pandemic-era study in NYC is featured in the Cornell Chronicle
  • Cornell Feline Health Center Rapid Response Fund takes aim at emergent threats to feline health, including a consortium research response to the ongoing H5N1 avian influenza virus outbreak and the significant risk it poses to cats
  • Not an FCoV-23 situation but tantalizing retrospective evidence to show the transmission differences between long and short FCoV-2 spike, and that these viruses create an ‘internal deletion’ as they move to FIP, see bioRxiv
  • Our FCoV-23 paper is out in Nature!
  • Join us for the 37th annual Fred Scott Feline Health Symposium (June 25-27) cornellfelinesymposium.org. Expert speakers cover a variety of important feline health topics, including:
    • An update on the impact of H5N1 infections in cats
    • The risks of feeding cats raw diets
    • An update on the efficacy of panleukopenia virus vaccines
  • On behalf of the FCoV-23 research consortium we are pleased to announce a new Position Statement on feline coronaviruses/FIP
  • Publication update: Rapid Clinical Resolution and Differential Diagnosis of a Neurological Case of Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP) Using GS-441524
  • Interested what’s happening with bird flu (highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, H5N1) in cats?; check out the Cornell CVM dashboard
  • As a way to understand what happened in Cyprus with FCoV-23, we have been looking at our ‘back catalog” of “FCoV-2s”, with some surprises; the snow leopards in 2012 actually had canine coronavirus – peer reviewed study is now out in IJID One Health
  • We are proud to be featured in the Cornell Feline Health Center Thanksgiving message, noting our international collaborative FIP surveillance program, especially as we just heard from Global Cornell that they will support our nanopore-based sequencing study with University of Sydney (Australia); see also an update to our genome article now in Qeios
  • Our study on a case of neurological FIP with rapid resolution following antiviral treatment is here; almost literally bringing this cat back to life!
  • Pathogenesis of FIP is strongly linked to its furin cleavage site. For a new structural analysis of this, see here.
  • Drs Whittaker and Licitra were proud to be able to share the latest on our FIP work and the latest antiviral news, and to be featured at the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Cornell Feline Health Center
  • A nice podcast from Scott Weese on the antivirals that “have revolutionized treatment of FIP, turning it from an almost invariably fatal disease to one that’s usually treatable. However, antivirals are expensive and administration can be a hassle (as many cat owners can attest to). As long as needed but as short as possible is what we aim for with anti-infective treatments, but what does that really mean?”
  • “Our new study on toxoplasmosis, and the challenges in diagnosing feline neurological disorders – and in the age of anti-virals, deciding when to treat or not to treat for FIP
  • “A cat a day keeps the doctor away…”; -spotted this book on the shelf at the local bookstore. Highly recommended!
  • Version 2 our of SARS-CoV-2 surveillance study in NYC cats is out in bioRxiv– new maps now, with travel history included
  • Molecular basis of pathogenicity of the recently emerged FCoV-23 coronavirus, as shown with our outstanding new collaboration with the Veesler lab – and their cryo-EM structures of  FCoV-23 spike, both “long” and “short
  • As we launch our new sequencing core at the Baker Institute, an example of how this is being used to study feline infectious diseases is here
  • Our latest study on the Bronx Zoo snow leopards with enteritis has been updated on bioRxiv. “An outbreak of canine coronavirus type 2 in captive snow leopards (Panthera unica) demonstrates a possible role for felids as mixing vessels for alphacoronaviruses”.
  • One hallmark of FCoV is its ability to evolve, both within-host (causing FIP) and between-host (for transmission events) – with the viral spike protein likely moving between open and closed conformations; see our pre-print for an example of how this may lead to unexpected transmission routes (a study notably curtailed due to the pandemic)
  • A new version of our white paper  “Rethinking the drivers of feline and canine coronavirus virulence and pathogenesis; toward an understanding of the dynamic world of coronavirus mutations, indels and recombination” (now with figures) , and will be available on Commons soon-  see Publications side-bar
  • Anti-viral update: While the Whittaker lab does not run clinical trials, we do partner with clinicans to help manage patient care and assess potential drug resistance. With oral GS-441524 now legally available in the US, hopefully we can work toward “test-to-treat” (see sidebar)
  • Our new article on human viruses is out, and a great way to learn about the equivalent proteases involved in FIP and FCoV-23, watch this space! “Host Cell Proteases Involved in Human Respiratory Viral Infections and Their Inhibitors: A review
  • A technical white paper from the lab “Rethinking the drivers of feline and canine coronavirus virulence and pathogenesis; toward an understanding of the dynamic world of coronavirus mutations, indels and recombination” (see Publications), is now available on eCommons
  • Our latest study is out in bioRxiv. An outbreak of a pathogenic canine coronavirus type 2 in captive snow leopards in the US, with severe gastrointestinal signs
  • Predatory journals—a cautionary tale for veterinary authors, see article by Cornell CVM colleague and JAVMA/AJVR editor in chief Lisa Fortier
  • Cornell Feline Health Center launches CatGPT an AI chatbot that answers questions about feline health
  • News from the AVMA: Unlicensed antiviral products used for the at-home treatment of feline infectious peritonitis contain GS-441524 at significantly different amounts than advertised
  • Its been a long time coming, but our SARS-CoV-2 surveillance study in NYC cats is now out in bioRxiv– bottom line, there was a lot of asymptomatic spread (human-cat) even during ‘lockdown”
  • Since January 2023 an outbreak of FCoV (FCoV-23) has been ongoing on the island of Cyprus, causing a 40-fold increase in PCR-confirmed cases of FIP. Join EveryCat Health Foundation for a webinar “Feline Infectious Peritonitis: From the FCoV to FCoV23, The Cyprus Case or A New Perspective in the Way We See Coronaviruses.”
  •  Our new study on using hybridization capture next-gen sequencing approaches for molecular epidemiology of FIP outbreaks is now out in bioRxiv
  • We’ve received funding from EveryCAT Health Foundation for diagnostic test development – to move our existing postmortem testing for FIP (e.g.) to be more useful antemortem – with an initial focus on lymph node fine needle aspirates (FNAs) – we will be incorporating next-gen sequencing approaches to risk assess cats in the clinic –  stay tuned for more details
  • FCoV-23, a new FIP virus in Cyprus
  • Over the 2023 summer break, a 6th year veterinary student in Nigeria, Damilola Gbore, conducted research at the Whittaker Lab on coronavirus development and transmission in felines. Read more in his interview here!
  • We are collecting feline conjunctival swab samples!  To learn more, visit our research updates page.
  • Dr. Whittaker has been elected the James Law Professor of Virology.  This professorship is named after Dr. James Law (1838-1921), a Scottish veterinary surgeon who taught veterinary medicine and was one of the first faculty members at Cornell University.
  • We’ve received funding from EveryCAT Health Foundation for a drug discovery project to look for inhibitors of FCoV ion channels. Carolina Menchaca has summarized her exciting work in a new blog post.
  • A new clinical case is available – this time it involves an FIP look-a-like that highlights the challenges clinicians face when making a diagnosis.
  • Our newest Research Activity post discusses our transition to Next Generation Sequencing (NGS).
  • Our one health blog discussed antimicrobial stewardship as it applies to both antibacterial and antiviral drugs.

Clinical Cases 

  • Every cat with FIP has it’s own story. In this blog, we present clinical cases that have advanced our understanding of this devastating disease.  In our latest post we follow the course of dry FIP in a foster kitten.  These neurologic cases of FIP are often slow in onset and challenging to diagnose as they lack the fluid accumulation seen with the wet form.  Why do some cats develop this more insidious form of FIP?  In this blog we discuss the possible link between a mutation in a critical viral activation site and the development of meningoencephalomyelitis in a young cat.

Research Reports

  • Immunohistochemistry has long been considered the gold standard for diagnosing FIP but RNA in situ hybridization may present a more sensitive alternative for detecting small quantities of virus in tissue.  Our post highlights the use of this technique.
  •  We’ve partnered with Haiyuan Yu in the Department of Computational Biology and the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology at Cornell University to deconvolve a new 3D structural interactome of SARS-CoV-2.  The goal of this work is to predict functional interactions between the viral proteins and important components of the infected human cells.
  • We teamed up with cell biologist Nihal Altan-Bonnet at the National Institutes of Health to tackle the issue of exactly how do coronaviruses escape the cell.  Her team demonstrated that the mouse coronavirus MHV does not use exosomes, the common biosynthetic pathway, but instead harnesses the power of lysosomes.  Our Research Associate Marco Straus ventured into Cornell’s BSL-3 laboratory to illustrate that the lysosomal pathway is also used by SARS-CoV-2.  This discovery, published in Cell, paves the way to new targets for antiviral drug development.
  • Previous research in our laboratory on SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV demonstrated that there is conserved reliance on calcium ions in the viral fusion peptide.  Calcium channel blockers, also known as CCBs, are widely used in human medicine for the treatment of cardiac problems.  Our Research Associate Marco Straus collaborates with Dr. Susan Daniel to screen a panel of FDA approved CCBs for efficacy as antivirals against SARS-CoV-2 and turns up two promising hits.
  • Doctoral student Tiffany Tang from Chemical and Biomedical Engineering collaborates with the Whittaker Lab to publish new insights on proteolytic activation of the SARS-2 by furin at the S1/S2 activation site.  Hear how she uses viral psuedoparticles to study the impact of this critical viral activation site on infectivity and get our take on the possible origins of this unique insert in SARS-2.

One Health

  • Dr. Alison Stout gives an interview on the podcast Locally Sourced Science about the her research in the Whittaker Lab on feline coronaviruses and how people can protect their cats from SARS CoV-2.  She also authors a blog post on our One Health page about the potential for  COVID-19 to affect wildlife.
  • We feel that the lessons that have been learned from animal coronaviruses have the potential to provide valuable insights into the fight against COVID-19.  We have recently published a detailed review of vasculitis related complications of both FIP and SARS-CoV-2 on Cornell e-commons website.  Access the full text here:  https://ecommons.cornell.edu
  • The effect of SARS-2 on the human vascular system are only starting to be understood.  From cardiac complications and COVID toes in adults, to multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), the world of human medicine is tackling some of the more perplexing and severe complications of SARS-2 in real time.  Dr. Alison Stout writes a compelling letter to JAVMA outlining the similarities between FIP and SARS-2: https://avmajournals.avma.org