Nanobodies are an exciting area of increasing interest in the biotherapeutics domain. They consist only of a heavy chain variable domain so are much smaller than conventional antibodies (about 1/10th of their mass) but despite this, manage to achieve comparable affinity for their targets, in addition to being more soluble and stable – good things come in small packages! Nanobodies are not naturally produced in humans but can be derived from camelids (VHHs) or sharks (vNARs) and then engineered to humanise them. For the rest of this blog post we will skip over the science entirely and learn how to draw a llama, a great example of a camelid species.
