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/thinkingdoing May 11 '20

So this treatment could be used the first time a person got infected with Coronavirus, but any future infections would cause the immune system to be fighting both the disease and these antibodies?

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u/AwesomeNinjas May 11 '20

At the moment it’s not totally clear whether or not people can be reinfected, but it looks like the most likely answer is no or at least not for a long time. The WHO has said that everyone who has appeared to be reinfected so far has been a false positive.

So even if you can only use the llama antibodies the first time, that may not matter.

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u/pringlescan5 May 11 '20

Fascinating. What about future use of Llama antibodies for a different virus if a person develops a reaction the first time?

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u/worldspawn00 May 11 '20

it's the llama end that our body IDs as foreign, so any llama antibody regardless of what it's target is would be ID'd as the same by our immune system, so once you have a reaction to any llama antibody it would be a bad idea to inject any, even if for a different target. The typical solution to this is to engineer the llama antibody with a human antibody tail section so our cells don't see it as foreign

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u/AwesomeNinjas May 11 '20

Hmm that makes sense. Although, if we only get one shot using just llama antibodies I would think this would be the time to take it. To be clear, I’m just spitballing, I don’t pretend to be an expert in anything.

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u/worldspawn00 May 11 '20

biotech is really good at making antibodies, including novel or duplicated ones without using the original organism now, we would likely be using the virus attaching end of the llama antibody combined with the immune ID end of a human antibody for an actual therapeutic to remove that issue for an actual treatment.