A new article published in eLife of work by NCDIR scientists has generated a huge repertoire of high-affinity nanobodies targeting all major regions of SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein.
The work carried out by members from the Rout, Chait and Aitchison Labs have managed to identify from their repertoire of nanobodies, highly synergistic combinations of nanobodies that increase the potency of neutralization, evade escape mutations leading to SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOC) by employing novel mechanisms of action on the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein.
The large repertoire of high affinity and highly specific nanobodies serves also to make available classes of nanobodies, whose binding covers a significant area of the Spike protein, resulting in nanobdoies that are still *active* against VOC with the potential to also be effective against emerging VOCs.
To read more about this groundbreaking work, read the full article here.
(A) Mapping the binding footprint of the Nanobody classes generated in this study against SARS-CoV-2 reveals significant binding coverage of nanobodies on Spike. (B) the neutralization strength of epitope regions on SARS-CoV-2 spike bound by nanobodies generated in this study, where red is strong neutralization and yellow is weak.