UKH

So this looks like some interesting and potentially very promising research! Scientists think they can engineer Covid specific anitbodies from llamas!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53369103

Not sure if that's good news for llamas or not - consider the poor horseshoe crab:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab#Harvest_for_blood

Excellent - nanoprobes. Live long and prosper!

We use llama ABs in the lab all the time, mainly commercial ones against GFP and other proteins, as well as synthetic genes that express an antibody fused to a fluorescent protein to label some target inside the cell that produces the antibody.

This works best with llamas because they have one type of AB that is made from a single chain, and therefore, unlike normal mammalian ABs, does not require complex processing steps during assembly and secretion.

Screening for Llama ABs that bind to a given target such as CV spike protein is therefore also much easier. The drawback is that such single chain ABs are hard to "humanize", i.e. replacing all the bits that are not involved in antigen binding with pieces of human AB so that the AB does not by itself trigger an immune reaction.

CB

It's slightly different to harvesting horseshoe crabs for LAL tests. I don't know the current state of camelid antibody research but it's possible that synthetic screening libraries are available by now which would take the llamas right out of the equation - that's how antibodies for things like cancer therapies from mouse or human sources are generated.  Even if you need to take blood for initial candidate screening that would be a relatively small blood sample, and once a candidate has been found you can make it synthetically. 

Beat me to it!  I used to work for a pharma company screening single-chain shark antibodies for biotherapeutic purposes (and actually, Elasmogen is also looking at these for Covid)