SARS-CoV-2-Blocking Nanobodies Can Handle Mutations, Take the Heat
Source: Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images
July 28, 2021
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Nanobodies, or single-domain antibodies, are smaller and simpler than conventional antibodies, but they have huge potential. Since this potential is being explored by multiple research teams, any one team has difficulty producing standout work. Yet researchers from two Göttingen institutions, the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry and the University Medical Center, assert that they have developed nanobodies that are truly special.
These nanobodies can block the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but that’s not especially distinctive. Nanobodies developed by other researchers can do that, too. What sets the nanobodies from Göttingen apart, the Göttingen researchers pointed out, is that they can bind and neutralize the virus up to 1,000 times better than previously developed nanobodies. The Göttingen nanobodies can also, in the researchers’ words, “tolerate the K417N/T, E484K, N501Y, and L452R immune-escape mutations found in the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Epsilon, Iota, and Delta/Kappa lineages.”