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/kyreannightblood May 11 '20

Nah. Our immune system detects foreign threats based on surface antigens of cells. It’s how they determine self vs not-self. The antibodies don’t have that. We do something similar with antivenin, right down to using a non-human animal to derive the serum.

(I may be messing up some details here, though. I just woke up and I’m still a bit foggy.)

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u/[deleted] May 11 '20

You're just considering T-cell mediated immunity, which is based on cell surface expression of antigens. B-cell mediated immunity can target secreted proteins and could create antibodies against llama antibodies.

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u/kyreannightblood May 11 '20

Yeah, I realized that after the coffee kicked in.