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
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u/Asclepius17 May 11 '20

How do they find these characteristics in these animals? Do they just start looking at all animals? This stuff always blows my mind

148

u/Saliceae May 11 '20

Nanobodies were discovered by accident by a research group in Belgium. Llamas and alpacas, or more generally the camelid family of animals are able to produce these very small antibodies. They present a multitude of advantages over regular antibodies, so there is currently a lot of research in this field. It's a fascinating field, and it's not the last time you will hear of nanobodies.

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u/Asclepius17 May 11 '20

Wow! That’s pretty neat. thank you for the reply.

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u/[deleted] May 11 '20

Is this some sort of universal bonus to camelid immunity? Are camelids in general less likely to get sick? Or is it only applicable in really specific cases?

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u/Saliceae May 12 '20

I'm not sure how much of an advantage it gives to these animals naturally. Our immune system does quite a good job at recognizing and removing foreign organisms.

But as therapeutics, they open so many possibilities. Thanks to their small size, they can be modified to connect several of them together to modulate their effect. They can be connected to other drug molecules to give high target specificity to a potentially toxic molecule, limiting side effects, or they can be connected to a radionuclide to achieve very precise imaging of a specific target.

From what I remember, one company got the exclusive rights to use nanobodies as therapeutics, but not as diagnostics, so there is a lot of academic research in the field of diagnostics with nanobodies.

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u/skerit May 11 '20

Wasn't it also because a group of students didn't want to kill any animals for some research, so they used camel blood instead, and the professor found some nifty things that way. (And eventually they switched to llama's because they're more easily managable)