In many nations, particularly poor ones, the threat to human life from poisonous snakes is frighteningly high, and anti-venom often in short supply and costly. A radical new approach to produce anti-venom in laboratory holds great promise to address this serious problem.

Anti-venom has been made in essentially the same way since Victorian times.  It involves milking snake venom by hand and then injecting the extracted venom into horses or other animals in small doses to evoke an immune response. The animal’s blood is drawn and purified to obtain antibodies that act against the venom. 

Producing antivenom in this way can get messy and dangerous. Moreover, the process is error prone, laborious and the finished serum can result in serious side effects.  Experts have long called for better ways to treat snake bites, which kill over 200 people daily.

At last, a new frontier in scientific research is giving renewed hope for a viable solution. Scientists are applying stem cell research and genome mapping to this long-ignored field of research. They hope it will bring antivenom production into the 21st Century and ultimately save hundreds, if not thousands, of lives each year. 

Two examples are noteworthy.  Researchers in the Netherlands have created venom-producing glands from the Cape Coral Snake and eight other snake species in the lab, using stem cells. The toxins produced by the miniature 3-D replicas of snake glands are all but identical to the snake’s venom.   In a parallel breakthrough, scientists in India have sequenced the genome of the Indian cobra, one of the country’s “big four” snakes that are responsible for most of the 50,000 snakebite deaths India sees a year.

The need is critical to offset the severely limited anti-venom supply. In Swaziland, Africa, for example, people are dying and losing limbs from the poisonous bites of snakes. The bites from the black mamba and Mozambique spitting cobra, to name a few, are causing great suffering among the poor there. The anti venom is very costly (approximately €90 per vial) and each victim needs at least 5 vials to survive. The cost for treatment is out of reach for most people as the average daily income is about $1 US per day. Time is very critical after one is bitten; anti venom must be administered within the first few hours to have any chance for a positive effect.

In one instance, an elderly lady who is paralyzed from her neck down suffered a horrific encounter with a Mozambique spitting cobra that had crawled into her hospital bed. In an attempt to scare the snake away, she wiggled her toes. The snake bit her. She tried again, this time a little harder, it bit her again. The third time she really tried with all her might and it bit her a third time. 

She lay with the snake in her bed the entire night until neighbors came to her rescue in the morning.  They called for an ambulance, but it never arrived.  Finally, they found someone with a car, but he demanded E200 to drive her, an amount she did not have. It took 5 days for her finally to get to the hospital, but by then it was too late for anti venom to be of help. The hospital could only cleanse and treat her wound minimally.  An on-site availability of anti-venom might well have precluded her great suffering and injuries.  

Our objective is to help develop this research and to facilitate deployment of resulting anti venom as quickly and as broadly as possible.