200 Snakebites Later, One Man’s Blood May Hold the Key to a Universal Antivenom
Over two decades, Tim Friede has injected himself with snake venom hundreds of times, and subjected himself to more than 200 bites. Now, scientists are working on an antivenom derived from his antibodies
After enduring some 200 snakebites and hundreds more venom injections, one man’s blood may be the key to a universal antivenom.
Over about two decades, Tim Friede has allowed venomous snakes to bite him hundreds of times, including Egyptian cobras, black mambas and diamondbacks. By starting with low doses of the toxins and gradually building up to sustaining real bites, Friede, a former construction worker from Wisconsin, has developed a tolerance to many of the world’s deadliest snake species.
“My first couple bites were really crazy,” Friede tells NPR’s Ari Daniel. “It’s like a bee sting times a thousand. I mean, you can have levels of anxiety that goes through the roof.”
Friede started building immunity to protect himself from accidental snakebites, then realized his experiments could protect people worldwide. Now, scientists have developed an experimental antidote from his antibodies, and in mouse trials, they found it fully or partially neutralized venom from 19 deadly snake species. The antivenom cocktail, described in a study published this month in the journal Cell, is still not ready for human testing. However, it serves as a big step forward in antivenom research.
“This is perhaps the best combination published today,” Technical University of Denmark biotechnologist Andreas H. Laustsen-Kiel, who was not affiliated with the study, tells Science News’ Meghan Rosen.
Snakebites—along with conditions like leprosy, scabies and dengue fever—are considered Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), according to the World Health Organization (WHO). NTDs are a variety of conditions that are mostly found among impoverished communities in tropical areas of the world. They are referred to as “neglected,” because they receive little attention from global agencies funding public health. Millions of people are bitten by venomous snakes every year, according to the WHO, and between 81,000 and 138,000 of those bites prove fatal.
Nonfatal snakebites can still be permanently disabling—hundreds of thousands of people are permanently disabled due to snakebites annually. “They might lose a limb, they might lose function in a limb, they might end up having to have huge surgeries, skin grafts, that kind of thing,” Stuart Ainsworth, a molecular biologist and snakebite researcher at the University of Liverpool in England who was not involved in the study, tells NPR.
Snakebites are also hard to treat, as the paper’s lead author, Jacob Glanville, CEO of the biotech firm Centivax, tells the Guardian’s Hannah Devlin. If medical staff don’t know what kind of snake caused a bite, they won’t know which antivenom to treat the bite with—but “it’s not a great option to go chasing after the snake that’s just bitten you,” adds Glanville.
To address this problem, Glanville reached out to Friede. He and other researchers were trying to develop an immune defense that could target entire classes of toxins, rather than just one toxin at a time. Friede presented a unique opportunity to find antibodies that could contribute to this goal.
“The first call, I was like, ‘This might be awkward, but I’d love to get my hands on some of your blood,” Glanville tells the BBC’s James Gallagher.
The team designed their antivenom cocktail based on 19 of the WHO’s deadliest snakes. They isolated antibodies from Friede’s blood and tested them on mice that had been injected with venom from these dangerous species. They picked two antibodies that worked against 13 of the snakes, then added a synthetic antivenom into the cocktail, which made the solution successful against all the venoms tested.
“By the time we reached three components, we had a dramatically unparalleled breadth of full protection for 13 of the 19 species, and then partial protection for the remaining that we looked at,” Glanville tells the Guardian.
Antivenoms that are effective across a range of snakes do exist, but this is the first one to use a synthetic antibody, according to NPR.
The team is now looking to test their antivenom on animals brought to veterinary clinics for snakebites before moving to human trials. The work brings scientists closer to the long-sought dream of a universal antivenom.
“It’s an overwhelming feeling knowing that what I’m doing someday can change—it already has—medical history,” Friede tells the Washington Post’s Laney Pope.