Some commentary from the authors:
hms.harvard.edu
…So, biochemists Andrew Kruse at Harvard Medical School and Aashish Manglik at the University of California, San Francisco, teamed up to create a llama-free solution: vials of specially engineered yeast.
The yeast method, described Feb. 12 in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, can be done in a test tube in a researcher’s own lab. It has a higher success rate and faster turnaround time than both llama vaccination and previous attempts to circumvent camelids, the authors say.
It also marks the first time a camelid-bypass system has been made freely available for nonprofit use.
“There’s a real need for something like this,” said Kruse. “It’s low-tech, it’s a low time investment and it has a high likelihood of success for most proteins.”
“People who have struggled to nail down their protein structures for years with llamas are getting them now,” he said.
…
The team tested its yeast system on two proteins: the beta-2 adrenergic receptor, linked to asthma, and the adenosine receptor, which is a gateway for caffeine to deliver its buzz. In both cases, the nanobody bound to the desired receptor, bound only to that receptor, and bound to it only when it was “on.”
“We found that the yeast-derived nanobodies can do everything llama-derived antibodies can,” said Kruse.
The team is now offering vials of the yeast mix and usage instructions free of charge to any nonprofit labs that want them. Commercial companies can license the yeast. “We made a big batch,” said McMahon, so there’s plenty to go around.
More than 40 labs requested vials before the paper was even published.
“Nanobodies are making it possible to develop drugs for biological targets that antibodies were simply too big to hit,” said Manglik. “By making nanobody discovery quick and easy, we hope our platform will dramatically accelerate the potential applications of this exciting technology.”
“I think we’ll see things that blow the animal immune system away,” added McMahon. “This is new technology. It’s only going to get better. Hopefully it will work as well or better so we won’t need llamas anymore.”
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