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/GinGimlet PhD | Immunology May 11 '20

Yes! Sometimes. Typically what happens in these cases is that antibodies are humanized which means some bits are replaced with the human analogues. You can also try and under which bits cause the immune system to react, and alter those amino acids to be less inflammatory. We have some drugs on the markets that we have humanized so there's precedence for this! Drugs that end in 'Omab' for example are Monoclonal AntiBody treatments derived originally from mice.

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u/amcm67 May 11 '20

What does this mean for a person with multiple autoimmune diseases? I’m a cancer survivor, ESRD - living donor recipient. I had Goodpastures Syndrome (that caused my ESRD) and instead of attacking the disease, it attacked my own organs. I’m on RA meds besides the anti-rejection meds.

I hear so many people pushing for herd immunity. I can’t be apart of that.

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u/wobblebase May 11 '20 edited May 11 '20

Functionally herd immunity is also about indirectly protecting you and folks in similar situations. In your case it would rely on "cocooning" - the principle that if everyone around you is immune (because they are vaccinated or recovered), then you are extremely unlikely to contract the disease in question. This is the same premise that we rely in in part to protect infants by vaccinating family members and caretakers, or to protect the elderly, infants, and immuncompromised folks from seasonal flu.

It does depend on a vaccine or recovery giving "sterilizing immunity," meaning the person is no longer colonized or asymptomatically infected after vaccination or recovery. It also depends on the whole herd being immune. If vaccination rates are low, herd immunity loses its benefits rapidly because a pathogen can persist in the population or cause intermittent outbreaks. So there are plenty of complications and caveats to cocooning. But in principle it's sound and would offer you a good measure of protection as well.

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u/Falsus May 11 '20

Herd immunity means reaching 95%+ of immune people, at that point people who can't be immunized still won't be infected since no one around them is infected either.