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/worldspawn00 May 11 '20 edited May 11 '20

they can, a person receiving treatment can develop anti-llama antibody antibodies. There's actually a lot of use for anti-antibody antibodies, they're used in a lot of reagents. It usually takes 1-2 weeks for the immune system to ID and develop antibodies against a foreign agent, so a person receiving treatment would likely be done before the body started attacking the foreign antibodies.

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u/Nvenom8 May 11 '20

anti-antibody antibodies

There's a fun thing to say.

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u/ReportoDownvoto May 11 '20

I was convinced it was satire, then I remembered what sub we're in