?? THE SNAKE ANTIVENOM OF THE FUTURE.

 

An article in the October issue Science described a new drug that could save the lives of up to 100,000 Africans.  It’s 3 years away from trials in humans but if it works—who knows. 

The article claims that each year about 100,000 Africans are killed by venomous snakes and the current antivenom isn’t very effective for a number of reasons. 

“This new kind of antivenom has proved protective only in mice so far. But  “It’s a potential game changer if all goes well.”

To make their antivenum Laustsen-Kiel and colleagues injected mixtures of venoms from 18 African snakes into llamas and alpacas and the animals made antibodies.

Their antibodies are smaller than those of horses and humans and have only one protein chain, instead of two, on each arm of the Y-shaped molecule.

Each arm, dubbed a nanobody, can be separated from its base while remaining able to bind a target molecule, such as a toxin.

The isolated arms lack the animal-specific sections that set off allergic reactions.

The team took the DNA sequences for the llama and alpaca nanobodies and added them to Escherichia coli bacterial cells to mass produce them in vitro. Then they screened for the ones that most effectively inactivated the toxins of the 18 snakes, including 13 species of cobras, four species of mamba, and one rinkhal.

AND ultimately identified eight nanobodies that, injected together with lethal doses of the venoms of the 18 snakes, protected mice from all but one snake-- the eastern green mamba (Dendroaspis angusticeps).  When the mice were injected first with the venom and received the cocktail 5 minutes later, it protected them from eight of 11 snake species tested. Laustsen-Kiel says the group now plans to investigate adding more effective nanobodies for the toxins of the three remaining snakes.  Interesting.

 

Science oct 2025  "New antivenom is a ‘potential game changer for snakebites. Synthetic cocktail of llama and alpaca “nanobodies” protected mice by christie wilcox