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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Drug soon after they have been bitten. But they would still receive antivenom once they reach the hospital. “That should buy us a window to measure the effect of the drug before antivenom is given,” Casewell says.Combining these pills with antibodies might produce even more effective therapies. "For me the really appealing experiment is what happens when you combine the two," says Matt Lewin, chief scientific officer at Ophirex. Centivax trialed that in mice and found that the combination of varespladib and the company’s antibody derived from the snake enthusiast did work better than the antibody alone.*Revolutionizing the way antivenom is produced won’t happen overnight. But in the meantime, the existing antivenom production can be improved without a complete overhaul.That’s what Kavi Ratanabanangkoon, an immunochemist at Mahidol University in Thailand, has been working on for more than a decade. Current antivenom production systems rely on horses’ ability to generate antibodies against snake venom. But there’s a limit to how many toxins the horses can handle at once and still produce a robust immune response, he says. So instead of giving the horses snake venom in its entirety, Ratanabanangkoon had the idea to filter it to retain only the most toxic components. He hoped that would allow him to administer toxins from a variety of species while still limiting the total number of venom proteins.Nobody was interested in his idea at first. But when Ratanabanangkoon approached the Royal Thai Army, they agreed to let him test the concept on three retired army horses. He and his colleagues selected venom samples from six elapid species from 12 different geographic locations. They filtered the venom to separate out the neurotoxins (which are, conveniently, the smallest proteins in the venom, making it easy to remove the bigger, nontoxic ones) and then gave this cocktail to the horses. The strategy worked. In 2016 the team reported that the antibodies the horses produced neutralized venoms from all six species plus 16 other elapid snake species found in Africa and Asia. And in 2020 the researchers reported that it works on nine other elapids—a total of 36
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