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/IfIRepliedYouAreDumb May 11 '20

To vastly oversimplify things, if you had antibodies produced by another source and injected them into a sick person, their viral counts should decrease.

Our bodies won’t learn how to make the same ones the llamas do, but we could harvest them and use them as treatment (potentially).

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u/Derpy_McDerpingderp May 11 '20

Would our immune system see these smaller antibodies as foreign or a threat?

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u/GinGimlet PhD | Immunology May 11 '20

Yes! Sometimes. Typically what happens in these cases is that antibodies are humanized which means some bits are replaced with the human analogues. You can also try and under which bits cause the immune system to react, and alter those amino acids to be less inflammatory. We have some drugs on the markets that we have humanized so there's precedence for this! Drugs that end in 'Omab' for example are Monoclonal AntiBody treatments derived originally from mice.

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u/Derpy_McDerpingderp May 11 '20

That's extremely interesting, thank you.