this episode was filmed on May 19 2020
if we have more recent videos about the
pandemic you can find them in our kovat
19 playlist which we will link in the
description in our last episode of
scishow News we talked about how
scientists are looking into whether the
serum pulled from the blood of people
who've recovered from kovat 19 can be
used to help those who are currently
infected that's because it contains
helpful a mutant proteins called
antibodies but if the stuff that got
from Tom Hanks and company doesn't work
they may have another albeit weirder
option you see in May scientists
announced they'd found antibodies from a
llama named winter that bind to this
corona virus and there's some reason to
think these antibodies might be better
than any of the ones from people
antibodies are proteins made by the
immune system the ones swirling around
in your blood right now are made of four
strings or chains of amino acids two
so-called heavy chains and two light
chains these are arranged in a Y shape
and the amino acids at the tips of that
Y are super variable this allows your
body to make different antibodies that
are essentially customized to stick to
the various things that it like to get
rid of like toxins or viruses when
antibodies stick and they can act as a
flag of sorts telling other immune cells
to kill the thing they're stuck to or
even better they can neutralize the
invader like by blocking the parts of
virus needs to infect cells all of this
is why scientists have been looking for
ways to use human antibodies to fight
off the virus that causes kovat 19 but
they don't always work like if an
antibody binds to the wrong spot on a
virus it might not actually prevent the
virus from doing its thing and
unfortunately sometimes our antibodies
can't reach or stick to the most
effective spots so in 1989 scientists
realized that the antibodies we have
aren't the only kind out there a
student-run project was looking for a
way to test camels and water buffalos
for sleeping sickness and when they
tested some camel serum their professor
had in the freezer they found a second
kind of antibody they're called single
domain antibodies or heavy chain only
antibodies because they have no light
chains and are instead just one long
heavy chain looped around itself because
of that they're about half the size of
regular antibodies in this leads to a
number of interesting properties like
that they're more stable when exposed to
heat but it also means that they can fit
into nooks and crannies that other
antibodies can't we know that all of the
animals in the camel family make these
miniature antibodies including llamas
and to be totally Frank we are not sure
why maybe having them conferred an
advantage against some ancient pathogen
or maybe they help the animals thrive in
extreme heat or cold but whatever the
reason from a medical standpoint the
stability precision and small size gives
these antibodies a lot of potential so
they've been investigated as
therapeutics for a wide range of
diseases including cancer HIV and the
flu and one recently got approved by the
FDA for treating a rare blood disorder
which brings us back to winter the llama
and how we might be able to use her
single domain antibodies to fight kovat
19 it just so happens that long before
the pandemic an international team of
researchers was looking to see if llama
antibodies could attack the corona
viruses behind SARS and MERS so they
immunized one of their llamas named
winter with spike proteins from those
two viruses spy proteins are the spiky
looking proteins that stick out from
coronavirus particles and they're what
actually grab on to our cells to start
the infection process so they're a good
target for a neutralizing antibody and
indeed previous work had shown that
single domain antibodies could gum up
the spike proteins of the MERS
coronavirus
preventing it from entering cells but no
one had tried to develop them against
the original SARS virus so the team was
pretty excited to find that after
injecting winter with those spike
proteins she produced many antibodies
that could neutralize both viruses and
they were in the process of writing up
their findings when January 2020 hit
with a new cousin of the corona viruses
behind SARS and MERS spreading around
the world they decided to investigate
whether these antibodies from winter
could attack it and they seemed to the
mini antibody that blocks the virus
responsible for SARS appears to work
against the virus that causes coded 19
which is really exciting but there's
still a lot of work to be done
pulling serum from one llama isn't
exactly going to be a sustainable way to
obtain a medicine also it sounds
unpleasant for winter so you might be
thinking just attach a llama farm to
every hospital that sounds great but
might be a little impractical so they'll
need to be sure that they can make a lot
of these antibodies on demand
luckily single domain antibodies are
essentially one long protein instead of
a couple stuck together so it's pretty
straightforward to get genetically
modified bacteria or yeast to
manufacture them for you so the bigger
obstacle might be getting everything
ready for tests and then running those
tests in people the researchers think
that'll take several months at least
probably more like a year but if they
prove safe and effective these
antibodies could help patients clear the
infection more quickly or even become a
preventative treatment for people like
health care workers but see these small
antibodies don't stick around in the
body super long the kidneys can filter
them out but they're fairly shelf-stable
and can be administered with an inhaler
so we could give them as a shield to
those likely to be exposed to the virus
like doctors and nurses and even if the
therapeutic angle doesn't pan out the
antibodies themselves might end up
improving diagnostic tests some tests
already use antibodies to detect the
presence of a pathogen or a person's
antibodies that target that pathogen so
it's possible llama antibodies could
make more accurate or cheaper versions
of those tests and we could definitely
use more accurate tests right now since
we're coming to realize that some of the
ones we've got have high false positive
or false negative rates so in some
llamas are just the best
and by the way winter is just fine one
of the study co-authors has reassured
everyone that she's living a happy life
on a farm in Belgium and if her
antibodies pan out to be helpful to the
human race I really hope she gets a
bunch of special treats or something I
don't know what a llama is like thanks
for watching this episode of scishow
news which is produced by complexly
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you vote you can check out our 20/20
guide at youtube.com slash how to vote
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