Could antibodies from camels fight human disease? A United Arab Emirates researchers thinks so and wrote an article for the British magazine The Biologist on the medical research potentials of camels.
Dr. Sabah Jassim argues that camel antibodies would make a good research tool since camels are highly resistant to a wide variety of diseases. Camels obviously evolved in an extremely harsh environment and are immune to diseases such as rinderpest and foot-and-mouth that afflict other mammals.
Moreover, because camel antibodies are both smaller and much simpler than human antibodies, Jassim argues they could be reproduced easily and could penetrate parts of the human body that antibodies from other species could not.
As it turns out, there is already some research being conducted in this area, including research to test the feasibility of using modified camel antibodies to create new generations of protease inhibitors. One of the diseases camels are immune to is river blindness, and research is also underway to clone the antibodies which provide this protection and develop a treatment for the disease in human beings.
Source:
Camels could help cure humans. David Bamford, The BBC, December 10, 2001.