Could cows be the vaccine factories of the future?
Cows are helping researchers understand human immunity. Someday, they could serve as testing grounds for whether vaccines are well-designed.
Famously, the word vaccine comes from the Latin word for cow — a namesake that traces back to the late 1700s.
Now cows are once again at the cutting edge of vaccine science. Thanks to a quirk of how cows make antibodies, they are helping researchers understand human immunity. Someday, cows could serve as testing grounds for whether vaccines are well-designed. And it’s possible that cow antibodies could treat everything from autoimmunity to infectious disease.
A on HIV by scientists at Scripps Research Institute explores these possibilities. Cows don’t get HIV, but,
