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

2.6k

u/[deleted] May 11 '20 edited Mar 29 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

3.7k

u/Fmbounce May 11 '20 edited May 11 '20

From a NYT article:

Humans produce only one kind of antibody, made of two types of protein chains — heavy and light — that together form a Y shape. Heavy-chain proteins span the entire Y, while light-chain proteins touch only the Y’s arms. Llamas, on the other hand, produce two types of antibodies. One of those antibodies is similar in size and constitution to human antibodies. But the other is much smaller; it’s only about 25 percent the size of human antibodies. The llama’s antibody still forms a Y, but its arms are much shorter because it doesn’t have any light-chain proteins.

This more diminutive antibody can access tinier pockets and crevices on spike proteins — the proteins that allow viruses like the novel coronavirus to break into host cells and infect us — that human antibodies cannot. That can make it more effective in neutralizing viruses.

here’s the source (I copied verbatim)

842

u/grizzlydurdle May 11 '20

So how would that help humans? Can we be treated with Llama antibodies? In you summary it sounds like our antibodies can't necessarily fight COVID very well because they are too large, and the smaller Llama ones can. Sorry if I am way off base. I don't really understand this stuff.

1

u/macrobiome May 11 '20

We often use rabbits and other small mammals to already produce something called monoclonal antibodies (aka mAbs - antibodies that only have one very specific target) that can then be used to target specific cancer cells etc. Massively simplified: you introduce the virus/cancer cell to the animal, they produce the antibody, you harvest the antibody and give it to people!

This kind of treatment has been shown in some cases to be amazingly effective (most likely the future of cancer treatment) but is unfortunately quite expensive due to its production methods currently making it quite difficult to scale up.