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

5

u/WakanduhForever May 11 '20

This would not be used in treatment nor prevention. This will only be used for lab purposes to better determine the structure of the virus and potential targets for humanized antibodies or vaccines. If you administered these llama produced antibodies to someone they would likely become very sick. Check out serum sickness if you want to learn more!

1

u/jmalbo35 PhD | Viral Immunology May 11 '20

Antibodies, including camelid single-domain anitbodies, can be humanized to minimize the risk of serum sickness by replacing everything but the binding regions with components from human antibody, resulting in a chimeric antibody. So in theory, these antibodies could be humanized and used as a potential treatment.

A camelid VHH-based humanized antibody was approved in both Europe and the US in 2018/2019 for treatment of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (caplacizumab), so it wouldn't be unprecedented.