Cheap, Innovative Venom Treatments Could Save Tens of Thousands of Snakebite Victims
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
Cheap, innovative venom treatments could save tens of thousands of snakebite victims:
[...] snakebites are finally getting the attention they've long needed. In 2017, the WHO officially recognized snakebites as a neglected tropical disease. That designation has led to an influx of funding for innovative research; the largest, more than $100 million, came in 2019 from the Wellcome Trust.
Effective snakebite treatments do exist, and those antivenoms are considered the "gold standard" of care. If a victim receives the right antivenom soon after a bite - within an hour or two - then the chances of survival are "very, very high," says Nicholas Casewell, a biomedical scientist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England.
But that "if" looms large, with big challenges remaining, including the difficulties of speedy access to care and the fact that most anti-venoms work against just a few of the hundreds of dangerous species of venomous snakes. Antivenoms are also "a technology that has seen limited innovation for 120 years," says Andreas Laustsen, a biotech researcher and entrepreneur at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby.
Now, researchers from disparate fields of science are coming together to reimagine the way snakebites are managed. Casewell, Laustsen and others are tweaking current treatments, repurposing pharmaceuticals and even engineering toxin-stopping nanoparticles. The work offers hope that people everywhere, even in remote areas, will eventually be able to safely coexist with snakes.
Venomous snakebites are painful and often deadly. This is an in-depth article that describes problems with accessibility, availability, cost, efficacy, side-effects, and more. For example, an antivenom for one species may not work at all on a different species -- and there are hundreds of them. Further, side effects from the wrong anti-venom are not insignificant. Well worth reading the entire article.
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