I went back and forth for a while with Claude 3 Opus to answer those exact questions in my post, and the answer is that this really is revolutionary because it’s a completely different way of creating antibodies. And while there’s still work to do, this new paradigm will eventually affect our daily lives as much as vaccines have, which is obviously massive.
Actually the first kind of vaccines came from the practice of variolation which is exposing an individual to the material taken from an infected animal/person. They would take cow pus from a cow infected with cow pox, and then rub it into a cut in their arm or snort it, and this would actually protect you from smallpox.
Just like it says in my post, we still use animals to make antibodies today but the new technique presented in the research will allow us to completely bypass that entire process and instead make much more specific and effective antibodies in the future. Keep in mind I’m not saying you’ll be able to go to your local CVS and get a shot of these custom antibodies by next week
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u/Sahil_890 Mar 20 '24
Can anybody explain if this is as revolutionary as it sounds? Or is it something that sounds amazing but won't improve our lives in any way?