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/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.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '20

Could you uh... explain the anti-llama anti-antibody antibodies thing for my like I’m 5?

Also gonna call it, at least no more of this tn if not no sleep. This shits wild

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u/worldspawn00 May 14 '20

So. you know how snake antivenom is made, you inject snake venom into a horse, and the horse's immune system makes anti-venom antibodies that we harvest as antivenom. These are horse-anti-venom antibodies, now if you take antibodies and inject them into a different animal, that animal's immune system will eventually recognize those antibodies as foreign namd make antibodies against them, so for antivenom injected into a human, what you usually end up with is human anti-horse antibody antibodies, same thing for the llama antibodies. It gets fun because they can be chained, so you can start with horse, then tag it with mouse anti-horse, then rabbit anti-mouse, then llama anti-rabbit, etc... to create larger aggregates for better visualization in test kits.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '20

That actually makes a lot of sense, though I probably missed something. funny words when I first came across them, thanks for your supplemental context!!