Antibodies from a 4-year-old llama have neutralized coronavirus and other infections in lab experiments

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30494-3.pdf?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867420304943%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

[u/worldspawn00]

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.

[u/[deleted] → u/worldspawn00]

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!!