A MAN WHO HAS BEEN BITTEN BY SNAKES MORE THAN 200 TIMES USES HIS BLOOD TO MAKE ANTIVENOM
Tim Friede is not like most people, who would do anything to avoid snake poison. The former truck mechanic has injected himself more than 700 times with venom concoctions and been bitten by more than 200 snakes in the last 20 years. His blood may now help researchers create a universal antivenom that would benefit the 1.8 to 2.7 million people who are bitten by poisonous snakes annually.
However, why did Friede initially begin injecting himself with snake venom? His personal snake collection, his need to protect himself, and a little bit of curiosity were the beginnings of it all. At first, Friede started injecting himself with tiny doses of venom and posted videos of his efforts on YouTube. After that, he allowed the snake to bite him and gradually increased the dosage to develop immunity.
“At first, it was very scary,” Friede tells NBC News. “But the more you do it, the better you get at it, the more calm you become with it.”
He kept developing immunity to a wide range of lethal snake venoms over the years, and at one point he started contacting experts to see if they would be interested in researching his blood. Friede's "experiment" is definitely not advised, but it did ultimately bring him into contact with Peter Kwong, a structural vaccinology at Columbia University, and Dr. Jacob Glanville, the CEO of the biotech business Centivax.
“Oh, wow, this is very unusual,” Kwong recalls thinking when hearing about Friede. “We had a very special individual with amazing antibodies that he created over 18 years.”
Dr. Glanville and a group of experts examined Friede's blood and reported their findings in a paper that was published in Cell. They discovered two antibodies in particular that neutralize a variety of snake venoms. While the research is early—and has only been tested on mice—there is hope that Friede's blood can lead to a broad antivenom.
This is encouraging news because snake bites cause about three times as many paralyses and amputations as they do fatalities, with over 100,000 deaths annually. Nonetheless, scientists warn that much more needs to be done and that human trials will inevitably be conducted many years from now. For now, the treatment appears effective against the group of snakes that include mambas and cobras, which use neurotoxins to paralyse victims, but not against vipers such as rattlers, which use hemotoxins to attack the blood.
Nevertheless, considering that the toxins in venom differ from species to species, it's a significant advancement. Saving lives would be greatly aided by the development of a single antivenom that works on a variety of snakes.
Professor Kwong is also optimistic that they will someday be able to create two antivenoms that would cover both families of venomous snakes, or at worst, one antivenom that would cover all snakes. "I anticipate we'll have something effective against each of those toxin types in the next 10 or 15 years," he says.
For Friede, who is now Centivax's director of herpetology, the results confirm that his initial experiment was for the greater good. “I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing as hard as I could push,” he explains, “for the people who are 8,000 miles away from me who die from snakebite.”
