Alpacas are a species of South American camelidae, smaller than their relatives the llamas and the guanacos. Their hair of fine, white, brown, black or mottled wool can grow up to 50 centimeters. They have wool because they live in the Andean highlands, up to 5 thousand meters above sea level, in Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador and Chile. In Chile they live in Antofagasta, Atacama and Coquimbo, to the north of the capital, Santiago.
Alpacas have a distinctive immune system. The scientific explanation to this is that parts of their antibodies need only one gene to be generated. This means their immune system is simple.
That is what the team at the Universidad Austral de Chile‘s Biotechnology Laboratory take advantage of in experimenting to develop antibodies against the coronavirus and Covid-19 from the blood of the alpaca. If they are successful, this research could result in an antiviral for human use.
“With a simple blood sample that we take from them, we obtain the genes that produce the antibodies, we can isolate them, and separate the groups that can recognize the pattern of the coronavirus. Then we produce that gene in a bacterium or other microorganism in an unlimited way,” explained which, led by Alejandro Rojas, the leader of this laboratory, as quoted by a Europa Press report that several media outlets reproduced.
Rojas is an academic at the Universidad Austral de Chile’s School of Medicine. His area of expertise is molecular biotechnology. One of the lines of work in the laboratory he heads is focused on generating “single chain” antibodies to diagnose and treat human diseases.
The laboratory has already worked with alpacas to combat hantavirus (which rodents transmit to humans), isolating from these animals the antibodies that they call nanobodies. Nanobodies have unique characteristics, as detailed in an article on the Universidad Austral de Chile’s website: they have “high affinity, high stability over a wide range of temperatures and pH”.
The name of antibodies in alpacas is nanobodies, because they are so small that they are invisible to the immune system, and they are easy to reproduce. “They have a much smaller dimension than those originating from other animals and many studies have shown them to be safe, stable and effective therapeutic tools for neutralizing viral infections in animal and human models,” the article explains.
So, the Biotechnology Laboratory of the Universidad Austral de Chile has used these nanobodies to transmit them to sick humans and produce immunity in them. They have done so not only with hantavirus, but they have also tested it with other emerging viruses, like the one that is now responsible for the symptoms of Covid-19.
In this case, the team’s experiments consist on inducing the alpaca’s immune system to recognize the strain of the coronavirus and fight it off. Using a high-tech microscope called the Celldiscoverer 7, they can make an automatic selection of the nanobodies in the animal’s blood sample and detect those that can neutralize the virus.
According to the Europa Press office, curated by José Rodríguez Sojo for El Confidencial, the laboratory “has already identified antibodies with promising results by immunizing several alpaca specimens with the recombinant Spike-1 protein, which is responsible for the entry of the coronavirus into human cells”.
This report says that the history with hantavirus makes this experiment promising. “The antibodies they created then were not rejected by the human body and were easy to reproduce.”
That is why they hope this research will result in an antiviral against Covid-19 for human consumption, which could be inhaled or injected.
Since last year, the Biotechnology Laboratory of the Universidad Austral de Chile has bred male alpacas for these trials in a hatchery at the Santa Rosa Experimental Center
“The value of our platform is to have a large group of friendly alpacas that generate immunity and share the genes of their peculiar immune system, as well as a multidisciplinary team prepared to face the global situation,” Rojas said.
Biochemist Yorka Cheuquemilla is in charge of administering and operating the CellDiscoverer 7 microscope in the laboratory, which arrived at the university on March 20, according to a report on El Mostrador.
Cheuquemilla said, as quoted in this piece, that the team has stored antibodies from immunized alpacas “with markers of various cancers, and more than 40 other proteins of pharmacological and/or commercial interest.”
According to the scientist, the coronavirus researh is being conducted in collaboration with virologists from Chile, Germany, United States and Korea, “and thus becoming a multipurpose platform against emerging infectious diseases.”
The Biotechnology Laboratory of the Universidad Austral de Chile with another laboratory from Canada’s Laval University, Europa Press reports, which “successfully developed” an Ebola vaccine during the outbreak on the African continent.