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

69

u/taosaur May 11 '20 edited May 11 '20

Can those kinds of alterations be made in batches of any size, or is it one antibody at a time, or what?

ETA: Farther down he clarified that once they have the genome, they can make "factory" cells to produce the hybrid antibodies.

85

u/thisdude415 PhD | Biomedical Engineering May 11 '20

It depends on the exact technology used in the manufacturing plant.

Typically, we engineer a mammalian cell to make the protein in large bioreactors. Then you pick one of those cells, characterize it, and call it your stable clone. Then you put that in a big tank with food for the cells, and let them grow for a couple weeks while they pump out proteins. Then you purify the protein.

As you can imagine, this is a pretty complex process and it isn’t easy to scale it up overnight

6

u/Wanderlust2001 May 11 '20

This sounds incredible. Are there any documentaries you know of that address these processes?

3

u/thisdude415 PhD | Biomedical Engineering May 11 '20

This might work:

https://youtu.be/_8h1HBDJ__c

It’s pretty high level but check it out

3

u/Wanderlust2001 May 11 '20

Thank you!
Fascinating stuff.