Could llama called Fifi hold key to Covid cure?

Her antibodies may pave way for cheap, effective nasal spray

‘Significant possibilities’

A COVID treatment made from antibodies taken from a llama named Fifi has shown ‘significant’ potential in trials.

Health officials have hailed it as among the most effective ways of neutralising the virus so far tested.

Small, simple antibodies known as ‘nanobodies’ are produced by llamas and camels to fight viruses.

Scientists took four nanobodies from Fifi (pictured below), a good-natured and ‘co-operative’ llama kept on a farm at Reading University, copied their genetic code and created a synthetic version.

The nanobodies latch on well to Covid’s ‘spike’ protein and are small enough to be delivered as a nasal spray. This could deliver the treatment directly into a person’s airway, which the virus attacks. The treatment has been proven to work so far only in hamsters, but scientists at the Rosalind Frankin Institute in Oxford hope it could provide a cheap alternative to vaccines to treat and prevent early infection. Professor Ray Owens, head of protein production at the Rosalind Franklin Institute and lead author of the research, said: ‘Nanobodies have a number of advantages over human antibodies.

‘They are cheaper to produce and can be delivered directly to the airways through a nebuliser or nasal spray, so can be self-administered at home rather than needing an injection.

‘This could have benefits in terms of ease of use by patients, but it also gets the treatment directly to the site of infection in the respiratory tract.’ Professor Miles Carroll, deputy director of the National Infection Service at Public Health England (PHE), said: ‘Although this research is still at an early stage, it opens up significant possibilities for the use of effective nanobody treatments for Covid-19. ‘These are among the most effective Sars-CoV-2 neutralising agents we have ever tested at PHE.’ Llama nanobodies have created much excitement in the medical community, and have also been trialled for respiratory syncytial virus, which can leave children and babies struggling to breathe.

Earlier this year the US regulator approved a llama-inspired antibody fragment to treat a rare blood disorder.

To trial llama nanobodies for coronavirus, researchers injected Fifi with part of the spike protein which the virus uses to get into cells.

This did not make the young llama ill, but triggered her immune system to recognise the virus protein by generating nanobodies against it.

After taking a blood sample, researchers isolated four types of nanobody.

Then they created synthetic versions in the lab, in chains of three to increase their ability to bind to the virus.

Llama nanobodies protected cells from infection in the lab, when tested against the Alpha and Beta variants as well as the Delta variant which is now dominant in the UK, although more research is needed.