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Why can't scientists inject horse blood into humans? (self.askbiologists)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by TheSmartDude to c/askbiologists

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So as most of you know, scientists inject germs into horses, since horse blood can easily create a antibody which can then be used to create a type of vaccine.

However, instead of injecting the disease into the horse blood, why can't horse blood be injected into humans? The immune system of the horse can create an antibody for every disease in our body as soon as we get it?

The diseases that horses get can be negated by the horse blood as well, since it is already used to diseases that horses can get.

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[–] Cha0zz 3 points 1 year ago

Hey, I’m not a biologist so someone might have a better/more complete answer. unfortunately injecting horse blood in humans would not be possible. First the immune system is much broader than the blood. The lymphatic system for example plays a major role in creating and training immune cells that target specific diseases. So injecting blood of a horse wouldn’t actually grant you a horse immune system. What we do now is indeed injecting horses with human pathogens to which the whole horse immune system reacts and creates antibodies. We can then isolate these from the blood. But just injecting the blood would this not give you the power of the much more complex immune system and would not even allow for the creation of new antibodies. I would really recommendthe kursgezagt videos about the immune system and diseases, they really do a good job of explaining the complex system in understandable terms.

Additionally injecting horse blood would trigger te human immune system. That’s because it contains many foreign proteins that are not present in the human body. If you would put a lot of horse blood in a human body you might even get a severe enough reaction to kill the patient (like a severe allergic reaction)