Creating pathogen-targeted chick egg yoke antibodies to cure ME/CFS

[Sushi]

I particularly like the idea mentioned in this paper that egg yoke IgY antibodies could be orally or intranasally administered to humans to help fight against pandemic influenza.

@serg1942, @Sushi, you are the experts and experienced on LDI treatment. Can you see any connection between these treatments?

I don't know enough to comment except to say that LDI is not taken orally, nor would it work that way. It targets cells that are in the mouth (sublingual dosing) or in a surface layer of the skin (intradermal injection.)

 

[Hip]

Low-dose immunotherapy (LDI) is a different concept: LDI involves giving you low doses of the things you are allergic to, in order to try to reduce your allergic response. LDI does not involve taking antibodies to fight infection, but rather taking low doses of the antigens that normally provoke an allergic response in the patient.

 

[JaimeS]

....this is the weirdest and most fascinating thing I've read in awhile.

I wonder if it would work similarly with other domestic fowl; I seem to react to chicken eggs, but not duck.

....I'm going to buy a duck to do mad science experiments on it?

"What's Jaime doing?"
"Oh, the usual injection of a blood sample into her duck. She has to catch it first. It's hard with her ME."
"...should we go help her?"
"...give it a few minutes."

....this is not how I pictured my life.

-J

 

[Hip]

I'm going to buy a duck to do mad science experiments on it?

I wouldn't want to spoil your lovely mad science experiment, because I think life would be so much duller if we couldn't do mad science experiments every now and then! However, you might first want to check that duck egg IgY is as effective as chicken egg IgY for this purpose.

Also, I read there is a high concentration of IgY in chicken egg yoke; the chicken is a veritable factory of IgY production; however, I am not sure just how much IgY is produced in duck eggs.


One alternative is to separate out the IgY antibodies from the chicken egg yoke. That might prevent your food intolerance to chicken eggs. In three of the papers I cited above (these ones: 1, 2, 3) they provide a method of IgY extraction from the yoke that looks relatively simple (involves centrifuging).

 

[barbc56]

]Chicken goes cluck.
Cows go moo.
Duck goes quack?

Sorry but you knew someone was going to say this!

 

[JaimeS]

More quality entertainment from the Onion.

 

[Research 1st]

I think when any researcher claims to be able to cure ME/CFS (a collection of disorders, none of which we even know are related! it's best to check the calender to see if it's April 1st. First we need a biomarker, or we aren't thinking rationally.

Similarly with patients claims of cures.

When that exists, then we can start considering different therapies and alleged 'cures' - otherwise we rely on beliefs of the patients, which is personal religion. (e.g. ''this is the best drug for headache I've ever taken'' - what does 'best' mean?). It means best to them not to us. Secondly, define headache. Naturally psychiatrists know this, and use this argument to their benefit to use against ME being organic (hence they need fatigue criteria CFS to remain), but then they twist the story by never revealing the emerging biomedical research contradicts their permanent argument of no definitive proof = no proof at all (which is incorrect of course). It's some proof,not none.

A useful analogy of alleged 'cures' within the ME/CFS spectrum may be objectively weighing up if someone claiming they traveled to Mars and back, (before a spaceship has been constructed to get there), actually did travel there because they claimed to. Theoretically they may have done, but in all likelihood, they didn't, especially as they can't show the hanger in which their spaceship is kept...because it was lost (therefore never had to have existed). Now it may have existed, but it didn't have to have done. The same then applies to the patients 'ME/CFS' that was cured with therapies. We don't know, the patient ever had it, as no test exists to verify this.

Ergo claiming to 'recover' from ME/CFS (before we know what it is), is no less absurd as curing ME/CFS with therapy X, Y, Z including egg yoke antibodies. Hence people are rightly skeptical, even if it's based on something as 'serious' as antibiotics, antivirals or cancer drugs. You have to know who you are treating first, and without biomarkers, we don't know who - so know robust claims can be made.

Rituximab + Abnormal Antibody depletion know to cause symptoms = evidence of a therapy working (countless other autoimmune conditions are treated like this) in a subset with these antibodies (e.g. Muscaranic acetylcholine Receptor Antibodies (M1, M2, M3), Alpha/Beta adrenergic receptor antibodies or others.

Vs

CBT + GET = no evidence. CBT GET is not proven to alter the underlying causes of someone's ME/CFS as you aren't finding any abnormal pathology first, in which to treat it with something other than behavioral therapy - ergo they never had an underlying disease in the first place - the premise of PACE - which failed.

This may sound harsh, but it's sadly the situation we find ourselves in. This should change in the next 5-10 years or even before, if someone makes a miracle breakthrough, or multiple breakthroughs for subsets of conditions that at the time, met the various criterias for an individual to be diagnosed with CFS or ME.

 

[JaimeS]

I wouldn't want to spoil your lovely mad science experiment, because I think life would be so much duller if we couldn't do mad science experiments every now and then! However, you might first want to check that duck egg IgY is as effective as chicken egg IgY for this purpose.

Also, I read there is a high concentration of IgY in chicken egg yoke; the chicken is a veritable factory of IgY production; however, I am not sure just how much IgY is produced in duck eggs.


One alternative is to separate out the IgY antibodies from the chicken egg yoke. That might prevent your food intolerance to chicken eggs. In three of the papers I cited above (these ones: 1, 2, 3) they provide a method of IgY extraction from the yoke that looks relatively simple (involves centrifuging).

From Evaluation and Validation of a Duck IgY Antibody-based Immunoassay for High-Sensitivity C-reactive Protein: Avian Antibody Application in Clinical Diagnostics... yes, you can use ducks.

 

[JaimeS]

Ergo claiming to 'recover' from ME/CFS (before we know what it is), is no less absurd as curing ME/CFS with therapy X,

If I no longer experienced symptoms, I'd consider myself cured. I know what you mean, though. I hear people saying CBT cured them and then adding descriptions of the 'few' symptoms they still experience, which seem as miserable as before.

What people are talking about here doesn't require absolute knowledge of the causative agent -- so long as an avian can mount an antibody defense, it doesn't matter.

You are making a few assumptions to buy this, but they're not infinite.

1. At least part of the problem with ME/CFS is of infective origin. This is an assumption, but it's not one for me personally. I test for weirdo pathogens and get positives frequently. At the last meeting I had with my immunologist, he said, "are you sure you don't have HIV?" Lots of overgrowth of pathogens I shouldn't be having a problem with.

2. Avian organisms' immune systems mount defenses against the pathogens that would bother a human being. @Hip has provided resources that say so.

3. These immunoglobulins are transferred to their eggs. This is not a big leap, but in case you want data to back this up, there's lots of data on maternal immunity in chickens. If, you know, you do get the urge to read some...

4. These immunoglobulins aren't immediately just digested in the stomach, but confer at least some of their immunity to the human who ingests them.

I'm actually with the science until the last bit. But I don't automatically rule it out because it sounds silly (even though it definitely does!)

If you had a small farm, this would be a few minutes of your time and cost you nothing but pride and a finger-prick.

So, you wasted your time? Oh well...

-J

 

[Hip]

If you had a small farm, this would be a few minutes of your time and cost you nothing but pride and a finger-prick.

Indeed. If there were some ME/CFS patients who lived on or nearby a farm, this treatment would be a doddle.

@jimells, I seem to remember you once said you bought a farm property. Keep any chickens?

 

[Hip]

@JaimeS Looks like ducks are something of an undertaking to keep:

Ducks are extremely emotional—more emotional than cats and dogs. If you raise one duck and that duck depends on you, you can’t leave him or her alone for even one day without the duck missing you and getting upset, depressed, or scared when you’re gone. Don’t do that to a duck. Ducks need duck friends.

They can live between 10 and 20 years—and sometimes longer—depending on the breed.

I guess when keeping a duck or a chicken you could always kill it and eat it afterwards, like any farmer does; but I think I'd find it hard to do that to any chicken that had faithfully laid for me hundreds of health giving eggs.

 

[barbc56]

Maybe @Jonathan Edwards can give his take on this.

I don’t quite understand the transfer of antibodies. It sounds like it's a legtimate treatment with all the citations but that's no guarantee and it's over my head to figure that out.

If there is credible science behind this treatment would this translate to the treatment posed by the author of the blog? Are there dangers taking it upon yourself to try this. I think I can guess the answer to this last question.

I wouldn't be surprised if any treatments should only be given in a clinical setting, under strict protocals and not appropriate as an experiment to do in your backyard.

Thanks. As always when/if you have the time as it's not my intention to disrupt your schedule.

 

[Snow Leopard]

I agree with the thoughts of @Valentijn..

But less politely: it is a quack therapy that is based on misunderstandings of biology and won't work.

To start with, proteins like immunoglobulins don't survive the digestion system in-tact...

 

[JaimeS]

To start with, proteins like immunoglobulins don't survive the digestion in-tact...

That's what I was worried about, @Snow Leopard ... I was following along until then.

-J

 

[Hip]

proteins like immunoglobulins don't survive the digestion system in-tact...

Good point, I forgot about that aspect. A quick Google check finds this study on IgY, which states that: "all studies in humans, including infants, show, that there is no absorption from the intestine."

Although things may be slightly different in patients with intestinal hyperpermeability (leaky gut). I believe in leaky gut, LPS can be translocated across the intestine into the blood circulation (and intestinal LPS can also be translocated into the blood in the case of HIV infection 1). Now, some of the immunologically active immunoglobulin fragments have been shown to be as small as 50 kDa in weight, which is smaller than the 100 kDa molecular weight of LPS. So if LPS can pass through the intestine in cases of leaky gut, perhaps so might IgY.



In this study they found that intranasally administered IgY extracted from egg yokes was effective in fighting influenza B infections in the lung. That suggests at least some systemic absorption of IgY occurs intranasally. The study mentions something about intranasal lesions; so possibly those lesion were the route by which IgY was intranasally absorbed into the bloodstream.

That study, incidentally, found that each egg yoke produces around 77 mg of IgY antibodies.



But even if IgY is not systemically absorbed in the human gut, it could still have a potent antiviral effect just in the stomach and intestines, which may ameliorate ME/CFS symptoms. Remember that Dr Chia found a chronic enterovirus infection in the guts of ME/CFS patients. The gut is a major reservoir for enterovirus in the body.

And of course Prof Ian Lipkin thinks that ME/CFS might be caused by the gut microbiota.

Orally administered immunoglobulins survive transit through the stomach, as this study found IgG is pretty resistant to degradation by stomach acid, and that orally administered IgG retains much of its neutralizing ability as it transits through the stomach and moves along the digestive tract. So I expect oral IgY is going to have significant antiviral and antibacterial effects along the entire length of the stomach and intestines.

This study says:

IgY possesses remarkable resistance to extreme pH values, temperature, and pepsin. IgY is stable at pH 4–9 and up to 65 °C in aqueous conditions, and it retains antigen-binding activity in the presence of pepsin at pH 4–6.

Why Injections of Chicken Egg IgY Might Work Better Than IVIG for Treating ME/CFS

I am not suggesting anybody should try the following, but it could represent a new avenue of research in terms of developing effective but inexpensive ME/CFS treatments.

I am wondering how feasible it would be to extract the IgY antibodies from the egg yoke by centrifuge, sterilize them, and then administer to ME/CFS patients by injection. This is precisely what they did in this study using chicken egg IgY injections to treat parvovirus infection in dogs, and they had good results.

Let's consider how chicken egg IgY injections might compare to regular medical intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) therapy for ME/CFS, which is pretty expensive at around $25,000, and is only effective in a subset of ME/CFS patients.

IVIG typically uses 400 mg/kg of IgG, so that will be a total dose of around 30,000 mg of IgG for a patient. By comparison, chicken egg provides around 77 mg of IgY per yoke, so if you collected 90 eggs from your chicken, you'd get around 7,000 mg of IgY.

But remember, weight for weight, this IgY is probably going to be much more potent that regular IgG from IVIG, because the chicken IgY has been specifically tailored to target the virus driving your own ME/CFS, whereas the IgG from the intravenous immunoglobulin therapy has not been produced specifically for your virus.



In fact, it is quite possible that the reason standard medical IVIG is not effective for most ME/CFS patients is simply because the IVIG does not contain any antibodies that target the patient's particular ME/CFS-causing virus.

IVIG contains antibodies pooled from thousands of blood donors, and if none of those blood donors have the particular viral infection you have, and thus none of the donors are producing IgG antibodies to your virus, then IVIG is likely going to be ineffectual for your ME/CFS.

When it comes to enterovirus, there are 6 species of coxsackievirus B, and 32 species of echovirus, that could be driving your ME/CFS, and so there is no guarantee any of the IVIG blood donors will have your particular viral infection, and no guarantee that these donors will be making antibodies to the virus causing your ME/CFS.

Or even if a few blood donors did have your particular infection, their antibodies are going to be greatly diluted down in the IVIG therapy by all the antibodies from the other blood donors which inappropriately target the wrong infections. IVIG provides a very broad-spectrum set of antibodies, targeting a wide range of pathogens, rather than specifically-targeted antibodies tailored for your infection.

Whereas with this system of chicken egg yoke-derived IgY antibodies, you can be sure that there will be large quantities of IgY antibodies that specifically target your ME/CFS-causing pathogen (or pathogens, if there is more than one infection in your blood causing your ME/CFS).

 

[halcyon]

Quote: " Then you should preferably eat the yolk basically raw because the antibodies are heat sensitive.However, you can boil the eggs up to three minutes so that only the whites have time to clot.Best is also taking a teaspoon of baking soda along with the yolk to extinguish the hydrochloric acid which can also kill the antibodies." (My bolding)

Proteins (like immunoglobulins) are digested by enzymes more than stomach acid I believe. Even if this did work there is no mechanism in the human gut to transfer them into the bloodstream.

All that aside, wouldn't these antibodies just get attacked by the immune system? That's the whole reason why they have to humanize antibodies like rituximab by making them chimeric I thought.

 

[Hip]

All that aside, wouldn't these antibodies just get attacked by the immune system?

I would not have thought so, given in the study I mentioned above they intravenously injected IgY antibodies into dogs with parvovirus infection without problems.

IgY is the major antibody in birds and reptiles, whereas IgG is the major antibody in mammals; but it seems that injecting IgY into mammals does not cause an immune reaction, at least in dogs. The study notes:

Another characteristic of IgY is that it has a short half-life, 36 h, which is much shorter than the half-life of mammalian IgG. The half-life of sheep IgG is up to 15 days.

The clearance of IgY happens immediately, which avoids possible toxic reactions and immune recognition.

Further study is needed to confirm this advantage of IgY in prolonged and repeated administration in mammalian animals. We observed that the half-life of IgY in this experiment was 60 h and no adverse reactions were recorded in the animals after 6 months observation.

The study also says:

The results of this study clearly indicate that IgY has great potential to cure clinical cases resulting from infectious diseases. More studies are needed to compile its advantages and to understand its possible side effects. As previously stated, we can easily produce and purify IgY from egg yolk.

More studies are needed to prove the safety of the protocol, especially for repeated treatment of an animal using different IgY to cure various infectious diseases. Pre-clinical studies are likewise required to elucidate the effectiveness of IgY as a cure for various human fatal infectious diseases. This work widens the potential for IV administration of IgY in human and animal medicine.

 

[Hip]

Proteins (like immunoglobulins) are digested by enzymes more than stomach acid I believe. Even if this did work there is no mechanism in the human gut to transfer them into the bloodstream.

If you look at this earlier post, you see that IgG and IgY are remarkably resistant to degradation by stomach acid and digestive enzymes.

In this study they noted that:

Bovine milk Ig concentrate purified from hyperimmunized cows against four human rotavirus serotypes has also been studied in a group (n = 164) of low birth weight infants. The infants were dosed at 2 g Ig concentrate/kg/day for five days. Of the infants receiving Ig, stool samples from 47% had detectable bovine IgG and 43% maintained rotavirus-neutralization activity against bovine rotavirus.

So IgG can often travel through the stomach and entire digestive tract, and still retain its ability to neutralize virus. I believe IgY is similarly hardy and resistant to stomach acid and digestive enzymes.



Although there may be no systemic absorption into the blood circulation of chicken egg yoke IgY when orally administered to humans, if this oral IgY is able to clear all traces of enterovirus infection from the stomach and intestines of an ME/CFS patient, that alone might conceivably lead to major improvements in symptoms.

 

[rosie26]

I guess when keeping a duck or a chicken you could always kill it and eat it afterwards, like any farmer does; but I think I'd find it hard to do that to any chicken that had faithfully laid for me hundreds of health giving eggs.

Would the eggs be okay to eat for those who don't have ME? I have a member of the family who has chickens, but lives in another city, not too far away.

 

[Hip]

Would the eggs be okay to eat for those who don't have ME? I have a member of the family who has chickens, but lives in another city, not too far away.

I should think the eggs will be perfectly OK for anyone to eat. I can't see any reason why they wouldn't be. Chicken eggs will I think always contain IgY antibodies anyway.