Human clinical trials begun for promising, llama-derived COVID antibodies

 Human clinical trials have begun in study of so-called nano-bodies, a smaller, eminently stable version of coronavirus antibodies derived from llamas. Such antibodies may be the key to saving humanity from the novel coronavirus, research has shown. Now it’s being tested in people.

Lab-derived llama antibodies seem to blunt COVID-19 and its variants, showing promise both for supplementing vaccines in immunocompromised people, and in treating people who have contracted the virus.

Research conducted by a Belgian biomedical startup at the VIB-UGent Center for Medical Biotechnology in Ghent showed that antibodies extracted from a particular llama, name of Winter, had made SARS-CoV-2 – plus its variants – less virulent in laboratory tests, reported Reuters.

If the study is borne out, such treatment could add another layer of protections to vaccinated people with compromised immune systems, the researchers told Reuters. It could also be used to treat infected, hospitalized people and could potentially be a “game changer,” Dominique Tersago, chief medical officer of VIB-UGent spin-off ExeVir, told Reuters.

“At the moment we’re not seeing mutations of a high frequency anywhere near where the binding site is,” Tersago told the news agency.

Llama antibodies are unusually small and are thus able to squeeze in where others cannot and bind to specific parts of the virus’s protein spike, Reuters noted. Camels, alpacas and llamas are from the camelid family, known to create a particular kind of antibody that’s stable and small, as Stat News reported last year.

“Their small size... allows them to reach targets, reach parts of the virus that are difficult to access with conventional antibodies,” VIB-UGent group leader Xavier Saelens told Reuters.

Antibody treatment is no substitute for vaccines, the researchers emphasized. Prevention through vaccination and masking are much better at blunting COVID than trying to get rid of once it takes hold.

Researchers hope that clinical trials under way in healthy volunteers and hospitalized COVID patients as of last week, in conjunction with Belgian pharmaceutical company UCB, will be similarly effective.

The tantalizing prospect is being studied elsewhere as well, including the U.S., though not in human trials as of yet. Those antibodies, too, are showing promise, as a study last year from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine indicated. An earlier study published in the journal Cell in May 2020 by a team from the University of Texas at Austin, the National Institutes of Health and Ghent University in Belgium, which is also involved in the current trials, laid the groundwork.

The research pre-dates the pandemic by a few years, but scientists have pivoted to apply it directly to the coronavirus. The delta variant had not yet formed or been detected when the earlier research was conducted, but Winter’s antibodies show “strong neutralization activity” against it, Tersago told Reuters.

https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-covid-human-clinical-trials-begun-belgium-llama-antibodies-coronavirus-20210824-uxmikgspsfb3pes5mjgm4k72wa-story.html