If you could take any animal body part and add it to your own, what would you pick?

Of course, there are the classics like bird wings or fish gills. Or you could go niche with something like sticky gecko feet. sure you could climb walls, but also No more slipping in the shower!

What about the antibodies of … a camel? It’s probably not at the top of your list. But unlike eagle eyes or insect body-armor, putting stuff from a camel’s  immune system into humans is something we’re already doing.

And it turns out that these camel immune cells are giving us pathogen-fighting powers like never before. [Intro music] Our immune system is basically a tiny army inside the body, constantly fending off invaders and threats. The “special forces” of that army would be the adaptive immune system, which is made of cells that target specific pathogens  and learn to fend them off, by producing one key weapon: antibodies. In humans and most other animals, these antibodies are Y shaped proteins, with two long heavy chains  that make up the long part, and two light chains that are attached to the little legs of the protein, like this.

The proteins along the chains are designed to stick to the surface of different pathogens, messing up their ability to cause trouble and making it easier for bigger  cells in our immune system to come along and eat the pathogen up. Bon appetit! But it turns out, the adaptive immune systems in some animals have more than one kind of  pathogen-blasting ammunition to work with.

A 1993 paper from Belgian scientists in the journal Nature found that camels have another different type of antibody along with their Y-shaped ones. They also have antibodies consisting of just the two heavy chains, like this. Since these simplified antibodies are even smaller than the regular ones, researchers called them nanobodies.

Soon they were finding those same nanobodies in other animals like llamas and even in sharks, which evolved to produce  them totally independently. For microbiologists, that wasn’t just different, it was weird. In normal antibodies, the heavy and light chains contain complementarity-determining regions, or CDRs, which are like customizable protein slots dedicated to tackling different pathogens.

They’re sort of like differently shaped fingers that can grab onto all the different crevices and hand-holds on the surfaces of pathogens. The six pairs of CDRs on an antibody is what makes the adaptive immune system, well, adaptive. Your cells can tinker around with what proteins show up along all these chains to create exactly the right type to hold onto a virus or bacteria and call in the reinforcements to mess it up.

But nanobodies only have three CDRs per side, not the regular six. And you might think that lack of flexibility would make them worse at tackling different kinds of pathogens. It turns out, though, that being smaller and simpler in shape gives nanobodies unexpected advantages.

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In camels, nanobodies seem to be better at keeping viruses at bay than normal antibodies are. That’s at least partly because while they have fewer CDRs, some of them are longer, allowing them to probe a pathogen more easily than a shorter CDR can. Better still, because the overall nanobodies are smaller, they can fit into smaller nooks and crannies of a pathogen that normal antibodies might struggle with.

If you’ve ever eaten fresh crab or lobster, the nanobodies are basically like those tiny little picker forks that let you get every last bit of the meat out. You just can’t do that with a regular fork. Which means that nanobodies can actually grab on to certain pathogens better than normal antibodies.

More generally, their small size also means nanobodies penetrate way deeper into  different kinds of body tissue, so they can target things in  really hard to reach areas. Plus, they can cross the blood-brain barrier more easily than other antibodies can. That makes them perfect for things like targeted cancer treatments and neurological conditions.

On top of that, they’re more stable Regular antibodies break apart in high temperatures or high acidity, and also around digestive enzymes. Which makes sense, given that an enzyme’s whole job is breaking other compounds apart. But nanobodies are much more resilient against all three of those things!

All of this has another huge advantage for Team Human, which is that nanobodies are just easier to make. Their simplicity and stability makes them easy for us to tinker with, produce and purify in a lab. And while we can and still do harvest some of these right out of the camels, researchers also have some tricks to make our own nanobodies, no camel required.

Instead, we use the camel blueprint to force microbes to make these nanobodies for us. So while it’s hard to coax bacteria into producing those fully formed, ready-to-go antibodies we need to tackle diseases, it turns out we can make simple organisms like E. coli into our own  personal nanobody factories. What’s even cooler about all of this is that despite never having evolved in humans, we can put them into us to fight certain diseases, sometimes better than the  antibodies our own cells produce.

And we’re already doing it! In 2018 we got the first ever nanobody-based drug, Caplacizumab, which was designed to help patients with a rare blood disorder that causes excessive clotting. That clotting happens because of a build up of a protein called von Willebrand factor, or VWF.

The nanobodies in Caplacizumab are specifically designed to stick onto VWF just like it would do for a pathogen, which stops it from clumping up the platelets that form blood clots. That’s a pretty big deal for patients suffering from diseases where VWF would normally wreak havoc across their bodies. And scientists have made  similar kinds of treatments for tackling blood cancer and even arthritis, which are already out there treating patients.

Because nanobodies are pretty easy to tinker with, researchers and pharmaceutical companies are continuing to find new ways of using them to tackle diseases on the chemical level that our normal antibodies  could use some help with. So yeah, an elephant trunk  may be cool for party tricks, but the best body part we could  take from the animal world has to be camel nanobodies, hands down. Or in this case, hooves down. [ OUTRO ]