By Jatin Sharma - Infectious Disease Department Senior Editor
Published 16 December, 2021
Miniature antibodies in shark blood have been found to help prevent SARS-CoV-2, the large family of viruses which includes COVID-19. The article “Mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 neutralization by shark variable new antigen receptors elucidated through X-ray crystallography,” by Obinna C. Ubah et al. outlines how using shark antibodies to help fight COVID-19 is possible. Variable Antigen Receptors (VNARs), or more informally “shark antibodies” are much smaller than human antibodies and have a distinctive shape that allows them to pack tightly together to block the coronavirus protein from attaching to human cells. Antibodies work by binding to a virus protein in order to eliminate it. Human antibodies can only bind to flat surfaces of virus proteins. However, the small shark antibodies can not only bind to the surface of virus proteins, but they can also bind into deeper grooves on the protein. This is advantageous because these shark antibodies can bind to parts of the coronavirus spike protein that human antibodies can’t. These shark antibodies have also been found to be resilient to the changing and evolving structures of coronavirus variants. This means they may help in the treatment of a wide variety of COVID-19 variants, including Delta and Omicron. The key points made in this article are that shark antibodies can be used to fight COVID-19 because of their unique properties which allow them to bind to parts of COVID-19 spike proteins that human antibodies cannot. These shark antibodies can also be effective against many different variants of COVID-19.
This article’s methodology included testing multiple different shark antibodies to determine if all these antibodies had the same mechanism of action. In the article, it was acknowledged that different shark antibodies may work in different ways to help fight COVID-19. One thing to improve about this study would be to not only acknowledge but also explain how these different mechanisms contrast from one another and whether one may be more effective than another. The adaptability of shark antibodies may help prepare against outbreaks of other viruses that originate in animals and could potentially transfer over to humans. The use of shark antibodies as a way to fight COVID-19 provides a new way to help humans build immunity against viruses without needing vaccination, which could play a pivotal role in providing resistance against COVID-19 for people who are immunocompromised or do not respond well to vaccines.
References
Ubah, O. C., Lake, E. W., Gunaratne, G. S., Gallant, J. P., Fernie, M., Robertson, A. J.,
Marchant, J. S., Bold, T. D., Langlois, R. A., Matchett, W. E., Thiede, J. M., Shi, K., Yin,
L., Moeller, N. H., Banerjee, S., Ferguson, L., Kovaleva, M., Porter, A. J., Aihara, H., &
LeBeau, A. M. (2021). Mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 neutralization by shark variable new
antigen receptors elucidated through X-ray crystallography. Nature Communications,
12(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27611-y
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