AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Every year, venomous snake bites kill tens of thousands of people globally, and they permanently disable several-hundred thousands more. Now a team says it has developed an antivenom cocktail that works against a diverse collection of venomous snakes using a process that it hopes could lead to a universal antivenom. Here's NPR's Ari Daniel.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Most people try to avoid venomous snakes. Not Tim Friede.
TIM FRIEDE: My claim to fame is getting bit by snakes.
DANIEL: Friede used to hunt garter snakes growing up in Wisconsin. As an adult, his obsession turned to venomous snakes and the harm they cause people globally. He felt the most dramatic way to raise awareness of the issue was to allow himself to be bitten. Right out of the gate, though...
FRIEDE: I was put in ICU after two cobra bites, and I dropped in a coma for four days.
DANIEL: He recovered and got more careful. Friede estimates he's now been bitten some 200 times. His motivation evolved - to see if he could develop immunity to this swirl of toxins so that his body might provide a road map to making a broader kind of antivenom.
For decades, antivenoms have come from the antibodies generated by animals like horses injected with venoms. But Jacob Glanville, the CEO of the biotech company Centivax, he wanted to find a shared molecular site across multiple venom toxins from different snake species that he could target. And rather than using a horse, Glanville figured that a person who'd been repeatedly exposed to lots of different venoms might have antibodies directed against such a site.
JACOB GLANVILLE: I was calling vivariums hoping for a clumsy snake researcher.
DANIEL: And then he found Tim Friede.
FRIEDE: We need your blood. We need your antibodies.
GLANVILLE: If anybody has broken through the problem of getting the immune system to focus, it's this guy, by this repeated stimulation with all these snakes.
FRIEDE: I'm like, wow. Cool.
DANIEL: So Glanville scanned Friede's blood, poring over the troves of antibodies to find those that bound the neurotoxins of multiple snakes.
GLANVILLE: And we found the ultrabroad antibody that had this very remarkable ability to go bind right on the conserved site that the neurotoxin uses to cause paralysis.
DANIEL: In mice, the antibody worked fully against five snakes - the black mamba and a mix of cobras. Next, Glanville and his colleagues added a small molecule that had already been shown to work against some venoms, and they went back to Friede's blood and found a second broad-acting antibody.
GLANVILLE: And that's when we suddenly saw this coherent protection that was happening across this large panel.
DANIEL: This cocktail of three components offered mice complete protection against 13 species and partial protection against six more, representing venomous snakes from Asia, Africa, Australia, North America and more. There are other antivenoms that can neutralize a diverse set of snakes, but this is the first to do so using synthetic antibodies. The results are published in the journal Cell. David Williams is a scientist who evaluates antivenoms for the World Health Organization who wasn't involved in the research.
DAVID WILLIAMS: It's definitely a step in the right direction because it's answering some of the questions we have about how to properly design universal antibodies.
DANIEL: Williams cautions that further developing this cocktail into a truly universal antivenom will inevitably have its challenges, including doing human trials and expanding its coverage to vipers, which make up about half of venomous snakes. Meanwhile, when Tim Friede heard that his antibodies had helped create this new antivenom cocktail, he says he was happy.
FRIEDE: When I do it, I know I'm doing something for humanity and giving back to science.
DANIEL: Friede is now director of herpetology at Centivax, where the team is planning to test their new cocktail in dogs that have been bit by venomous snakes in Australia.
Ari Daniel, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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