---
title: The Urgent Quest for a Coronavirus Treatment Involves Door-to-Door Blood Collection and a llama Named Winter - Sanguine
description: Antibody treatments could be a bridge to a vaccine Written by Karin Brulliard and Carolyn Y. Johnson, The…
image: https://blog.sanguinebio.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/The-Washington-Post.jpg
---

 May 6, 2020 10:41:06 AM

# The Urgent Quest for a Coronavirus Treatment Involves Door-to-Door Blood Collection and a llama Named Winter

[ Admin ](https://blog.sanguinebio.com/researcher-blog/author/admin)

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## Antibody treatments could be a bridge to a vaccine

*Written by Karin Brulliard and Carolyn Y. Johnson, The Washington Post*

The global search for a [treatment](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/15/coronavirus-treatment-cure-research-problems/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2) targeting the novel coronavirus has led to an unlikely potential savior: a cocoa-colored llama named Winter, whose blood could hold a weapon to blunt the virus.

She lives at a research farm in Belgium with about 130 other llamas and alpacas. And like all of them, she produces a special class of disease-fighting antibodies — tiny, even by antibody standards — that show early promise in laboratory tests in blocking the novel [coronavirus](https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/?itid=lk_inline_manual_3) from entering and infecting cells.

In a [paper published Tuesday](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30494-3) in the journal Cell, an international team of scientists reports that these petite antibodies, harvested from Winter’s blood, were used to engineer a new antibody that binds to the spiky proteins that stud the surface of the novel coronavirus, “neutralizing” its insidious effect. The study, though preliminary, points to a possible treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, if the results hold up in animal and human studies.

Read the entire article [here](https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/05/06/urgent-quest-coronavirus-treatment-involves-door-to-door-blood-collection-llama-named-winter/)

[COVID-19](https://blog.sanguinebio.com/researcher-blog/tag/covid-19), [Press](https://blog.sanguinebio.com/researcher-blog/tag/press)

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[Admin](https://blog.sanguinebio.com/researcher-blog/author/admin) 

 Mar 30, 2020 1:52:05 PM

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## [Accessing Patients with In-Home Biospecimen Collection](https://blog.sanguinebio.com/researcher-blog/2020/04/03/accessing-patients-with-in-home-biospecimen-collection)

[Admin](https://blog.sanguinebio.com/researcher-blog/author/admin) 

 Apr 3, 2020 9:06:13 AM

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