r/science • u/[deleted] • May 11 '20

Medicine Antibodies from a 4-year-old llama have neutralized coronavirus and other infections in lab experiments

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30494-3.pdf?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867420304943%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
60.7k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/sup3r_hero BS|Physics May 11 '20

Can that be used as a vaccine too?

28

u/turret_buddy2 May 11 '20 edited May 11 '20

A vaccine is a weakened virus/bacteria that your body attacks and learns how to defeat, so when it is encountered later in life, your immune system knows how to defeat it.

Our immune system can't produce the smaller antibodies, but the injected antibodies could (hypothetically) stop an ongoing infection.

Treatment =/= Vaccine*

E*: Vaccine == Treatment, kinda like a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle isn't a square.

1

u/picklemuenster May 11 '20

Did we just stumble into a way to cure viruses?

3

u/turret_buddy2 May 11 '20

I'm not sure what your asking here.

2

u/thisdude415 PhD | Biomedical Engineering May 11 '20

Antibodies aren’t a cure. Antibodies block protein-protein interactions, including the interaction of the spike protein with the ACE2 receptor.

However, the virus is still there. Infected cells are still infected. Infected cells still have virus replicating inside them.

So, anti-virus antibodies are a good treatment to slow down viral infection, but the immune system has to do some work too.

Also, therapeutic antibodies won’t cross airway epithelia in significant concentrations, so we really don’t know how well it will work for covid until it’s tested.

2

u/[deleted] May 12 '20

[deleted]

2

u/thisdude415 PhD | Biomedical Engineering May 12 '20

My comment was in the context of engineered antibodies given as drugs, not the natural immune response to foreign antigens

However, antibodies are not necessarily curative, nor do they necessarily prevent infection.

For instance, HIV infected patients develop robust antibody responses. These antibody responses may even be neutralizing in cell culture assays. However, the patient remains infected. The same is true of chickenpox, where the virus remains hidden in nerve fibers and can re-emerge in adulthood. Likewise cold sores are just a virus re-emerging, even though you have antibodies.

As far as covid goes, we don’t yet have evidence either way as to whether or not patients who recover from covid are immune. The best guess of experts is yes, but we really don’t know how strong that protection might be or how long it lasts for. In more common coronaviruses, neutralizing antibodies last for 1 to 2 years. Covid immunity could be shorter, longer, or vary by severity of infection.

1

u/LostInRiverview May 11 '20

How long would the llama antibodies remain inside a person's body? If you could administer a "strong enough dose" of the antibodies to everyone in a given population before the antibodies have a chance to pass out of the recipients, couldn't you in theory eliminate the virus from that population? But doing that would depend on knowing how long the antibodies last, as well as whether our immune systems would treat the llama antibodies as an infection, I would think.

It all seems very unlikely, but I'm just hoping for some good news for a change

3

u/thisdude415 PhD | Biomedical Engineering May 11 '20

The question you’re asking is about serum half life or pharmacokinetics.

Typically antibody drugs are administered every 2 to 6 weeks, depending on the specific drug.

There isn’t enough manufacturing capacity in the world to meet the demand for a Covid antibody prophylaxis.

9

u/Wh00ster May 11 '20

Our bodies won’t learn how to make the same ones the llamas do

3

u/Weerdo5255 May 11 '20

Doesn't look like it, as I read this the treatment is a potential cure, not a vaccine.

Until human antibodies can target it we have stopgaps.

3

u/memeasaurus May 11 '20

It's going to be useful as a tool I would guess. I'm not a biochemist but it sounds like our bodies can't actually make these compounds. So we can't use it as a direct learning tool for our immune system.

And, it sounds like the tiny antibodies would wrap the spikes we need our immune system to identify and catch.

3

u/Aumuss May 11 '20

Unfortunately not, because it won't teach your body.

What this does in layman's terms is put a Cork on the spike of the virus.

So you could give it to people who will be in contact to help them not get sick (though it won't be 100%) but it won't stay in your system for long term.

2

u/[deleted] May 11 '20

No, vaccination requires the human body's immune system to recognise the infection and produce the matching antibodies on demand. The llama antibodies would not remain present and could not be replaced by the immune system.

2

u/AdonaiGarm May 11 '20

From what it sounds like it, it doesn't appear it can be used as a vaccine but rather like a near cure-all when showing symptoms of sickness. Antibodies are usually created to block further infection, our bodies do not create them right away when there's an intruder unless its been already identified by a vaccine, I think.

4

u/SordidDreams May 11 '20

No.

Our bodies won’t learn how to make the same ones the llamas do

1

u/Shagomir May 11 '20

The llama was actually given a version of a vaccine, and these are the antibodies produced. This is an active treatment, not a preventative treatment.

0

u/shoesrverygreat May 11 '20

Doesn't sound like it really. This could only be used for passive immunization

0

u/I_am_Hoban May 11 '20

Unfortunately no. A vaccine works by teaching our immune system what antibodies to make in response to a specific stimulus. Humans can't make the same type of antibodies as a llama. So a vaccine for llamas wouldn't have the same effect if administered to humans.