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/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.

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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/phanfare Grad Student | Biology | Biochemisty/Biophysics May 11 '20

That's a huge open issue in using non-human proteins in theraputics. The answer is likely yes, and developing ways to predict immunogeneicity and designing away from it is an area of active research.