Researchers have discovered a potent antibody that can neutralize a key type of neurotoxin produced by four different deadly snake species from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, a step toward an antivenom that could be used on any of the 200 or so dangerous venomous snakes throughout the world.
“We are wiping out a major subclass of neurotoxins here,” says Nicholas Casewell, a toxinologist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and co-author on a paper describing the antibody published today in Science Translational Medicine. “I think this is a really huge step in terms of what can be achieved by a single antibody.”
Snake venoms are a mix of dozens or even hundreds of compounds that target nerve cells, blood clotting, or tissues, killing an estimated 81,000 to 138,000 people around the globe annually and disabling hundreds of thousands more.
The standard treatment is antivenoms, a cocktail of antibodies harvested from horses or sheep injected with nonlethal doses of the venom.
Although these drugs save lives, “antivenoms suffer from numerous problems,” says Kartik Sunagar, head of the evolutionary venomics lab at the Indian Institute of Science and a lead author on the paper.
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