New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites

Summary

Title: New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Podcast: Short Wave
Host: Regina Barber
Guest: Reporter Ari Daniel
Release Date: May 21, 2025

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1. The Deadly Impact of Venomous Snakes

In the episode titled "New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites," NPR's Short Wave host Regina Barber, alongside reporter Ari Daniel, delves into the pressing global health issue posed by venomous snake bites. Ari Daniel opens the discussion by highlighting the severity of the problem:

Ari Daniel [00:29]: "Venomous snakes... [are] a big problem, especially in low and middle-income countries and in the tropics. The World Health Organization estimates that every year tens of thousands of people die as a result of venomous snake bites and that they permanently disable several hundred thousand more."

He elaborates on the varied health risks associated with snake venom:

Ari Daniel [00:52]: "There are neurotoxic venoms that can lead to paralysis, including of the airway, so people suffocate. Other venoms can affect the blood, causing it either to fail to clot or to form clots too readily. Some venoms cause intense pain and others cause no pain at all."

2. Tim Friedy: The Antivenom Volunteer

The episode introduces Tim Friedy, a herpetologist whose unconventional approach—allowing himself to be bitten by snakes—has been instrumental in advancing antivenom research. Ari Daniel narrates Tim's journey:

Ari Daniel [01:18]: "Tim Friedy... to raise awareness of the actual danger that venomous snake bites pose, he's allowed himself to be bitten some 200 times by all kinds of snakes, including black mambas, taipans, cobras, kraits, and more."

Tim shares his initial experiences:

Tim Friedy [02:04]: "My first couple bites are really crazy. Take a beast times a thousand, you can have levels of anxiety that goes to the roof."

Despite severe setbacks, including a near-fatal coma after cobra bites:

Tim Friedy [03:40]: "I was put in ICU after two cobra bites and I dropped in a coma for four days."

Tim's relentless pursuit not only expanded his immunity but also paved the way for groundbreaking research.

3. Breaking New Ground: Developing a Universal Antivenom

The core of the episode centers on the innovative approach to antivenom development inspired by Tim Friedy's extensive exposure to venom. Ari Daniel introduces Jacob Glanville, CEO of biotech company Centivax, who sought a novel method to create a broad-spectrum antivenom:

Jacob Glanville [07:12]: "If anybody has broken through the problem of getting the immune system to focus, it's this guy by this repeated stimulation with all these snakes."

Tim's unique condition provided a treasure trove of antibodies effective against multiple snake venoms.

4. Research Process and Innovative Strategies

Centivax’s research team analyzed Tim's blood to isolate antibodies capable of neutralizing a wide array of venoms. Jacob Glanville explains the discovery:

Jacob Glanville [07:55]: "And then that's how we found the ultra broad antibody that had this very remarkable ability to go bind right on the conserved site that the neurotoxin uses to cause paralysis."

This antibody demonstrated efficacy in preclinical trials:

Ari Daniel [08:05]: "The Antibody... gave mice full protection against five snakes: the black mamba and a mix of cobras."

Seeking to enhance the antivenom's effectiveness, the team collaborated with Peter Kwong, a structural biologist, who suggested a multi-antibody cocktail:

Ari Daniel [08:37]: "One that would take on even more snakes."

The resulting three-component cocktail achieved comprehensive protection in mice:

Ari Daniel [09:08]: "This cocktail of three components offered mice complete protection against 13 species and partial protection against six more, representing a set of genetically diverse venomous snakes from Asia, Africa, Australia, North America, and more."

5. Overcoming Challenges and Future Directions

While the achievements are significant, experts caution about ongoing challenges. David Williams, an antivenom evaluator for the World Health Organization, notes:

David Williams [10:24]: "There are lots of other different components in venoms, and we don't know going forward. If we just neutralize the key components in the venom, what will the other toxins do?"

Further development includes testing the cocktail in canine models bitten by Australian snakes, with hopes for human trials within a few years. Stuart Ainsworth, a molecular biologist, emphasizes the complexity of venoms:

Stuart Ainsworth [10:53]: "Venoms are complex chemical mixes... now we know this cocktail works in mice. He's eager to see how it'll work in people."

6. Tim Friedy's Continued Contribution and Legacy

Following the success of the antivenom development, Tim Friedy transitioned to a leadership role at Centivax:

Ari Daniel [10:59]: "He became director of herpetology at Centivax."

Tim reflects on his contribution:

Tim Friedy [11:10]: "I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't believe it. I'm doing something for humanity and getting back to science."

Though retired from active snake-biting, Tim occasionally misses the thrill:

Tim Friedy [11:27]: "To know you can beat that and keep her calm and keep her cool. It's a wonderful thing."

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Conclusion

This episode of Short Wave masterfully intertwines the harrowing realities of snake venom dangers with the inspiring story of human ingenuity and resilience. Through Tim Friedy's extraordinary commitment and the innovative efforts of researchers like Jacob Glanville and Peter Kwong, the quest for a universal antivenom takes a promising leap forward. As ongoing research addresses existing challenges, the potential to save countless lives globally becomes increasingly attainable.

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Notable Quotes:

• Ari Daniel [00:29]: "Venomous snakes... [are] a big problem, especially in low and middle-income countries and in the tropics."
• Tim Friedy [02:04]: "My first couple bites are really crazy. Take a beast times a thousand, you can have levels of anxiety that goes to the roof."
• Jacob Glanville [07:12]: "If anybody has broken through the problem of getting the immune system to focus, it's this guy by this repeated stimulation with all these snakes."
• David Williams [10:24]: "There are lots of other different components in venoms, and we don't know going forward. If we just neutralize the key components in the venom, what will the other toxins do?"
• Tim Friedy [11:10]: "I'm doing something for humanity and getting back to science."

Transcript

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[Regina Barber]

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers. Regina Barber here, and today I'm joined by reporter Ari Daniel, who who's gonna talk to us about snakes. Hey, Ari.

[Ari Daniel]

Hi there, Regina. Yes, venomous snakes, to be exact. They're a big problem, especially in low and middle income countries and in the tropics. The World Health Organization estimates that every year tens of thousands of people die as a result of venomous snake bites and that they permanently disable several hundred thousand more.

[Regina Barber]

Oof. That is awful.

[Ari Daniel]

Absolutely. The specific health risks vary, and that's partly because venoms are a bre of different chemicals. There are neurotoxic venoms that can lead to paralysis, including of the airway, so people suffocate. Other venoms can affect the blood, causing it either to fail to clot or to form clots too readily. Some venoms cause intense pain and others cause no pain at all.

[Regina Barber]

Okay, this is not helping my fear of snakes.

[Ari Daniel]

Well, would it help if I told you that I met a couple of researchers working on a potential solution?

[Regina Barber]

Yes.

[Ari Daniel]

It's a cocktail that works against a diverse collection of venomous snakes using a process they hope could one day lead to a universal antivenom.

[Regina Barber]

Ooh, that's really, really cool. Yes, that does help quite a bit.

[Ari Daniel]

Well, good, because this is happening. And it all started with this guy, Tim Friedy.

[Tim Friedy]

My claim to fame is getting bit by snakes for years.

[Ari Daniel]

Regina, he's let snakes bite him.

[Regina Barber]

Oh, gosh. Okay, tell me more, tell me more.

[Ari Daniel]

Let me go back a little to 2001. Tim started with cobras because that's what he had on hand at the time.

[Tim Friedy]

My first couple bites are really crazy. Take a beasting times a thousand, you can have levels of anxiety that goes to the roof.

[Ari Daniel]

Tim's been fascinated with snakes for as long as he can remember. He used to hunt garter snakes growing up in Wisconsin. They're harmless. But over the years, to raise awareness of the actual danger that venomous snake bites pose, he's allowed himself to be bit some 200 times.

[Listener]

Wow.

[Ari Daniel]

By all kinds of snakes. Black mambas, taipans, cobras, kraits, and more.

[Listener]

Wow. Wow.

[Regina Barber]

Okay. But all of this biting, it's to help people, right?

[Ari Daniel]

Yes, that's right. So this may be kind of a deep cut, Gina, but you've probably seen the 80s fantasy movie the Princess Bride.

[Regina Barber]

Yes, I've memorized that movie.

[Ari Daniel]

Perfect. So you already know that in the movie there's this fictional poison called iocaine powder.

[Regina Barber]

Yes. This is what I thought of as soon as you told me about this story.

[Ari Daniel]

Right.

[Wesley (from The Princess Bride)]

I smell nothing. What you do not smell is called iocaine powder. It is odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadly poisons known to man.

[Ari Daniel]

Wesley he's one of the main characters who was just speaking. He ultimately reveals that he's built up an immunity to this poison by starting with a small dose that wasn't enough to kill him and gradually increasing that dosage over time.

[Wesley (from The Princess Bride)]

I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocaine powder.

[Ari Daniel]

This is more or less what Tim did, Regina, except with snake venom. He admits it's been something of a rocky road though. Right out of the gate he says this happened.

[Tim Friedy]

I was put in ICU after two cobra bites and I dropped in a coma for four days.

[Ari Daniel]

He recovered, got more careful and he kept on going.

[Listener]

Wow.

[Ari Daniel]

Then at some point he was like, hey, could my immunity to this swirl of toxins provide some kind of roadmap to making a broad kind of antivenom?

[Regina Barber]

So today on the show the Antivenom Man. We're talking about a different approach to developing a treatment to venomous snake bites and the researchers who used Tim Friedi's antibodies to do it. Antibodies developed over a nearly quarter century of self inflicted bites. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from npr.

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[Regina Barber]

Okay, Ari, I think the first thing I want to understand is, like, what is antivenom? Like what is it made out of? Exactly.

[Ari Daniel]

Right. So usually when the human body encounters a foreign substance, whether it's a poison or a parasite or virus, it'll trigger some kind of immune response which involves the production of antibodies, specialized proteins that specifically recognize that substance, bind to it, and neutralize or destroy it.

[Regina Barber]

Right, Right. I kind of know about this. Like, even after the toxin has left your body, you retain like immune memory of it, right?

[Ari Daniel]

Yep. Right.

[Regina Barber]

So that if you, like, encounter this, like, foreign substance again, your body will recognize it and ideally mobilize against it more quickly. Like some vaccines work like this.

[Ari Daniel]

Exactly. So pit viper antivenom, for example, is made from antibodies that already recognize pit virus viper venom and know how to handle it. And those antibodies can be used as a treatment.

[Regina Barber]

Gotcha.

[Ari Daniel]

But here's the thing about existing antivenoms that might be administered. The antibodies that they contain aren't produced by human immune systems. For decades, they've come from animals like horses, that have been injected repeatedly with small amounts of venom.

[Listener]

Wow.

[Ari Daniel]

But this guy named Jacob Glanville, he's the CEO of a biotech company called Centivax. He wondered about a different approach, making antivenoms from antibodies produced by humans. So he started calling around.

[Jacob Glanville]

I was calling hoping for a clumsy snake researcher, and I was coming up empty.

[Regina Barber]

Wait, clumsy like somebody who's been bitten a lot?

[Ari Daniel]

Yes. And then Jacob read about Tim.

[Jacob Glanville]

If anybody has broken through the problem of getting the immune system to focus, it's this guy by this repeated stimulation with all these snakes.

[Ari Daniel]

So he found his way to Tim and called him up. Tim remembers Jacob saying to him, you're.

[Tim Friedy]

The guy I'm looking for. We need your blood, we need your antibodies. I'm like, wow, cool. Great.

[NPR Sponsor]

Wow.

[Regina Barber]

So, like, what happens next? Were the researchers able to synthesize something from Tim that, like, maybe could work as an antivenom?

[Ari Daniel]

Well, once Tim agreed to participate, Jacob got a blood sample from him and he scanned it for its immune memory. He searched the troves of antibodies for those that neutralize the neurotoxins of multiple, multiple snakes.

[Jacob Glanville]

And then that's how we found the ultra broad antibody that had this very remarkable ability to go bind right on the conserved site that the neurotoxin uses to cause paralysis.

[Ari Daniel]

The Antibody, which has a name that's just a string of letters and numbers like a license plate, gave mice full protection against five snakes.

[Listener]

Wow.

[Ari Daniel]

The black mamba and a mix of cobras. Wow. So Jacob and his colleagues wrote the journal Cell to gauge their interest in publishing the research. One of those colleagues was Peter Kwong, a structural biologist at Columbia University. Really smart editor said, look, antibodies are wonderful, but I think we could actually go further. And she proposed something like a working cocktail.

[Regina Barber]

A working cocktail of more than just one antibody.

[Ari Daniel]

Yes. One that would take on even more snakes.

[Regina Barber]

This is so cool.

[Ari Daniel]

The team agreed it was worth a try. First, they added a small synthetic molecule, one that had already been shown to work against some venoms. Here's Jacob again.

[Jacob Glanville]

And some additional species were suddenly covered, some completely and some partially.

[Ari Daniel]

The team also went back to Tim's blood and found a second broad acting antibody.

[Jacob Glanville]

And so we added that in and that's when we suddenly saw this coherent protection that was happening across this large panel.

[Ari Daniel]

This cocktail of three components offered mice complete protection against 13 species and partial protection against six more, representing a set of genetically diverse venomous snakes from Asia, Africa, Australia, North America and more.

[Regina Barber]

Wow, that is really, really cool. Is this the biggest number of snakes targeted by an antivenom? Like, until now.

[Ari Daniel]

There are other antivenoms that can neutralize a broad set of snakes, but this is the first one to do it using this approach.

[Listener]

Wow.

[Regina Barber]

Okay, so what's the next step here?

[Ari Daniel]

Well, eventually, human trials, which Jacob hopes are a couple years out. But before that, the team's planning to test their new cocktail in dogs that have been bit by venomous snakes in Australia. Okay, so this is a first step, but others in the field say it's an important one because it's answering some of the questions we have about how to properly design universal antibodies. This is David Williams. He evaluates antivenoms for the World Health Organization. He cautions that further developing this cocktail into a truly universal antivenom will inevitably have its challenges. Like right now, the recipe doesn't work on any vipers, which are a large portion of the venomous snakes that are out there.

[Listener]

Wow.

[Ari Daniel]

And another researcher I talked to, Stuart Ainsworth, he's a molecular biologist at the University of Liverpool who studies snake bites, antivenoms and antibodies. He told me that now we know this cocktail works in mice. He's eager to see how it'll work in people, given that venoms are complex chemical mixes.

[David Williams]

There are lots of other different components in venoms, and we don't know going forward. If we just neutralize the key components in the venom, what will the other toxins do? And this is why it's very important to do clinical trials.

[Regina Barber]

Okay, that makes sense. But let me ask you, Ari, like, what happened to that, like, snake bite dude? Like Tim Friedy.

[Ari Daniel]

He became director of herpetology at scentivax. That biotech company.

[Listener]

Wow.

[Ari Daniel]

When he heard that his antibodies had helped create this new antivenom cocktail, he says he was happy.

[Tim Friedy]

I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't believe it. I'm doing something for humanity and getting back to science.

[Regina Barber]

Aw. So is he still, like, letting snakes bite him?

[Ari Daniel]

He's retired from the snakes snakebite life for multiple reasons. But Tim told me he sometimes still misses it.

[Regina Barber]

Really?

[Ari Daniel]

Yeah. Mostly in terms of just knowing where it could take his mind.

[Tim Friedy]

To know you can beat that and keep her calm and keep her cool. It's a wonderful thing.

[Regina Barber]

Wow. Okay. Well, I'm glad he sees it this way. I could not do this.

[Ari Daniel]

Nor should you, Regina. No one suggests you take the Princess Bride approach to snake venom.

[Regina Barber]

Message received. Don't learn from tv. It's fantasy for a reason. Ari, thank you so much for bringing us this story.

[Ari Daniel]

I had a great time for sure, Gina. Thanks for having me.

[Regina Barber]

This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Special thanks to Johannes Durgi. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from npr.

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