Alpacas Could be the Secret Weapon Against COVID-19

While alpacas look cute and cuddly they could hold the key to fighting COVID-19. It’s your typical summer day in Kentucky and if you are an alpaca, you find a shade tree and you eat some grass.

Alvina Maynard, Alpaca farmer says, “I picked Alpacas because I am weird and everything else was kind of already taken. I wanted to do a niche of agriculture that I could do well to establish myself in.”

Alvina Maynard purchased her first alpaca in 2012. Eight years later, they’re being used to fight COVID-19.

Dr. Wally Whiteheart, University of Kentucky Researcher explains, “What we do is we immunize the animals or vaccinate them, if you want to think about it that way, with proteins from the virus, so they make antibodies to the viral proteins, and we can actually purify them, work with them, and characterize them and those can be used as inhibitors of viral infection.”

Doctor Wally Whiteheart is part of the team at The University of Kentucky doing the research.

Dr. Whiteheart, “They actually make a special kind of antibody that’s called a single chain antibody.”

Or nanobody, which is a smaller and more stable type of antibody. The bottom line, nanobodies could be more effective at fighting this virus due to their small size.

Dr. Whitehart, “Regardless whether we have something that can be used as a drug, we’ll have something that can be used as a test for COVID or as to do other basic science for COVID, basic research on COVID, so these will be valuable no matter what.”

Helping us win the battle against a deadly virus.

Alvina Maynard, “Our little family farm, in Richmond, Kentucky, could somehow be a part of saving the world, that’s crazy to me and I’m overcome with emotion about it.”