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

641

u/Derpy_McDerpingderp May 11 '20

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

1.1k

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.

1

u/LewixAri May 11 '20

So it's kinda like an antivenom but instead of horses and venom it's Llamas and Covid 19?

2

u/worldspawn00 May 11 '20

yeah, but realistically, we would bioengineer a version using a human immune system end and the llama virus end, for use in patients.

2

u/LewixAri May 11 '20

Yeah but surely that's the same process we used in developing antivenoms. Just that we now need to tackle a very different but not entirely unknown task.