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a team of scientists says they’ve created a lab-made antibody geared to counteract toxic bites from a wide variety of snakes. In early tests with mice, the uber-antivenom appeared to work as intended.
Snake antivenom is typically derived from the antibodies of horses or other animals that produce a strong immune response to snake toxins. These donated antibodies can be highly effective at preventing serious injury and death from a snakebite, but they come with serious limitations.
The chemical makeup of one species’s toxin can vary significantly from another’s, for instance, so antibodies to one specific toxin provide little protection against others. Manufacturers can try to work around this by inoculating animals with several toxins at once, but this method has drawbacks, such as needing a higher dose of antivenom since only some of the antibodies will have any effect.
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Though snake toxins are remarkably complex and different from one another, even within the same class, the team managed to find sections of these toxins that were pretty similar across different species.
The scientists produced a variety of 3FTx toxins in the lab and then screened them against a database of more than 50 billion synthetic antibodies, looking for ones that could potentially neutralize several toxins at once. After a few rounds of selection, they ultimately identified one antibody that seemed to broadly neutralize at least five different 3FTx variants, called 95Mat5. They then put the antibody to a real-life test, finding that it fully protected mice from dying from the toxins of the many-banded krait, Indian spitting cobra, and black mamba, in some cases better than conventional antivenom; it also offered some protection against venom from the king cobra.
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As seen with the king cobra, the 95Mat5 antibody alone may not work against every elapid snake. And it wouldn’t protect against bites from viper snakes, the other major family of venomous snakes. But the team’s process of identifying broadly neutralizing antibodies—adapted from similar research on the HIV virus—could be used to find other promising antivenom candidates.
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Source: Universal Antivenom for Snake Bites Might Soon Be a Reality
Robin Edgar
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