💌💌💓NOW YOU CAN PLAY WITH COBRAS 🐍 WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT VENOM ?❤️❤️

VENOM CAN'T HURT NOW :

AN ANTI BODY❄️ HAS BEEN PREAPRED TO❎ NEUTRALIZE SNAKE 🐍VENOM TOXINS😡

Toxins in the venom of black mambas (one shown) and certain other snakes can paralyze 🧑‍🦯snake bite victims. A lab-made antibody that targets these toxins could be a step toward a universal anti-venom.

The anti-venom for a black mamba’s bite could one day work for a slew of other snakes.

Scientists have developed an antibody that shuts down paralyzing toxins in the venom of black mambas, king cobras and dozens of other sharp-toothed serpents. The antibody — a single protein manufactured in the lab— protected mice from otherwise lethal doses of venom, protein engineer.

Joseph Jardine and colleagues report in the Feb. 21 Science Translational Medicine. That antibody “will be a critical component of an eventual anti-venom,” says Jardine, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

Venomous snakes generally rely on just a handful of toxin families. If scientists could mix together antibodies targeting each of those types, Jardine says, they could potentially create “one vial of anti-venom that works against any snake in the world.” Such a universal anti-venom might still be many years away, he says. But “theoretically, this is possible.”

Scientists have tallied hundreds of venomous snake species across the globe. In North America, a person might stumble upon a western diamondback; in Africa, a puff adder; in South Asia, a saw-scaled viper. A bite from any one of these snakes can maim or kill. Venomous snakebites kill up to about 140,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization. Lifesaving anti-venoms exist, Jardine says, but they’re “built with 100-year-old technology.

That technology involves injecting animals like horses or sheep with snake venom and harvesting the venom-targeting antibodies that their immune systems churn out. A snake bit patient would then get an infusion of horse or sheep antibodies — if doctors have them in stock.

The process has major drawbacks, Jardine says. Each animal produces antibodies for just one type of venom. Currently, bites from a yellow-bellied sea snake, cottonmouth or inland Taipan would all require different treatments. Another issue is the health effects of the anti-venom itself. “You’re putting a whole bunch of horse antibodies into a person,” Jardine says. People can get sick or even go into anaphylactic shock.

His team’s approach could glide past those problems. In a collection of more than 60 billion lab-made antibodies, the team hunted for ones that target a particularly vicious venom component used by some snakes: long chain three finger alpha-neurotoxins.

These molecules look like a small hand with three fingers, says biotechnologist Andreas H. Laustsen-Kiel of the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. When delivered into a person’s blood stream via snakebite, the hand literally gives victims the finger. The toxin’s middle finger pokes into a protein needed for movement, shutting down muscles and paralyzing the body.

Antibodies that grasp the finger can block its toxic touch, Laustsen-Kiel says.

Last year, his group reported several new antibodies ,including a human antibody that neutralizes three-finger toxins like the one in Jardine’s study.

But the new antibody “looks like it’s even better than ours,” Laustsen-Kiel says. It appears to grab a wider array of toxins and with a tighter grip, he says.

In mice given venom from a black mamba and an Indian spitting cobra, injecting the antibody saved the rodents’ lives, Jardine’s team reports. The researchers are now working to develop antibodies that target other venom toxins.

Still, the idea of creating a single, universal anti-venom may not be entirely realistic, Laustsen-Kiel says. “It simply doesn’t make sense from a product perspective,” he says. Instead, Laustsen-Kiel envisions anti-venoms that are tailored for use in specific regions.

Whatever the formulation of these future anti-venoms, research on snakebites — considered a neglected tropical disease — is underfunded, Jardine says (SN: 9/19/20). Though millions of cases occur in rural India and Africa, there’s relatively little money available for improving treatments, he says. (Jardine has funding from the London-based global health charity the Welcome Trust.) Snakebites just aren’t considered a medical priority,

Jardine says. But for people whose families and livelihoods depend on their ability to farm, he says, losing life or limb to snakebite is devastating.