Llamas are bored, slow-eating South American camelids prized for their fur and leather, but beneath the fur and hide, these domesticated beasts of burden hide something else. Powerful tools Something that humans are trying to use.
Llama (Llama Grama) are exposed to certain deadly human viruses, scientists say The body produces powerful immune proteins It’s different from anything we humans create.
Using this knowledge, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed a human-llama hybrid antibody that can suppress HIV, one of the most insidious infectious diseases known to man.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is a cunning, shape-shifting virus that rapidly evolves to block human antibodies. Cling and restrain Foreign threats.
“Traditional antibodies are bulky, making it difficult for them to find and attack the surface of the virus.” explain Jianliang Xu, a biologist at NIH and George State University;
Llamas have different antibodies. As with sharks, alpacas and camels, Llama It is one of the few animals known to produce ultra-small antibodies called nanobodies, which are about one-tenth the size of a normal antibody.
These nanobodies are “light on their feet” and highly flexible, and their small size and elongated shape enable them to slip through enemy defenses. virus This is to suffocate the most infectious part of the virus.
Stimulates the production of HIV-sTo develop the specialized nanobodies, NIH researchers injected parts of the HIV-1 envelope into one llama 13 times within a year.
Then, through careful design, they took the most potent HIV nanobody they could find and fused it with part of a broad-spectrum human antibody against HIV.
These broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs that can target multiple strains of HIV Discovered in some human patients in the 1990s. but After nearly 40 years of research, scientists have yet to develop an HIV vaccine or long-acting bNAbs-based treatments that can effectively resist viral mutations.
Although the human antibodies and llama nanobodies target different parts of the virus, each is able to neutralize 90% of HIV-1 strains on its own, making the combination of the two approaches “super-potent,” the researchers say. writeThe llama-human chimera was able to suppress 96 percent of 208 HIV strains in the lab.
it is 10x more powerful It is superior to a human-llama antibody previously produced by the same researchers.
“These nanobodies are the best, most potent neutralizing antibodies to date, and we think they hold great promise for the future of HIV drugs and antibody research.” To tell Payton Chan, a biology doctoral student at Georgia State University;
“We hope that one day these nanobodies will be approved as treatments for HIV.”
It remains to be seen whether the newly developed llama-human chimera will be able to target HIV infection in live animals and humans, but the fact that the treatment can bind to two of the virus’s most vulnerable sites should make it harder for pathogens to escape the immune system’s clutches.
antibody Infusion Recently appeared as a promising method of treatment, prevention, or even cure. HIVHowever, previous studies have shown that high doses of highly specific bnAbs are required to achieve sustained efficacy.
Perhaps llama nanobodies are a way to make these treatments more potent at lower concentrations, but how long the drugs last is another challenge.
HIV antibody treatments that would only require patients to receive them about once a year could prove highly effective in clinical practice. Currently, these treatments are Needs refilling Every few months.
NIH researchers are now working to engineer new combinations of llama and human antibodies to see if they can develop even more powerful treatments.
This study Cutting-edge science.
