Will protein design tools solve the snake antivenom shortage?
14 comments
·May 8, 2025karmakaze
JTbane
Anyone else find it hilarious that snake bites follow the logic of "expose yourself to just a little deadly poison to gain immunity"?
jjtheblunt
Why? It's immunologically sensible : let the immune system train antibodies on a non lethal amount of novel protein antigen, like traditional vaccines, and (i bet to your point) in stark contrast with "homeopathy" in some definitions.
worthless-trash
A man called "Ram Chandra" used to come to my school in the 80-90's and educate us on the danger of snakes (he has since passed away).
There is a little talk of it here https://www.mackayandwhitsundaylife.com/article/remembering-...
I had seen him get bitten by a bunch of different snakes during his time demonstrating dangerous animals to my school on different occasions, he was always very kind and educational.
I believe he had was also involved in milking snakes and making antivenom, but the specifics evade me.
I believe he went to many different schools educating the small townships of the Australian outback (Imagine more than 20 less than 30) and always had time to answer my stupid questions as a child.
This part of my local culture will be missed.
thorin
It doesn't mention if he died from snake bites... Sounds like an interesting guy!
HarHarVeryFunny
I recently watched this YouTube documentary about a Borneo tribe, barely clinging onto their traditional ways/knowledge (displaced by the logging industry) who used a plant as a supposedly universal snake bite remedy ... I wonder if there was ever a scientific study of how effective it actually is?
User23
The shortage is already rather artificial. A snakebite treatment that costs $150k in the USA is just a few hundred dollars in Mexico.
yorwba
There's two kinds of shortage here: the availability in principle of an antivenom for a specific snake venom and the availability in practice of a dose of antivenom to treat a specific snake bite.
Rich people paying whatever it takes to avoid dying provide a captive market for the first case (at least as far as snakes that rich people often get bitten by are concerned), and protein design tools also aim at this kind of shortage.
But as the article points out, most people getting bitten by snakes are affected by the second kind of shortage, because they're too poor to afford several hundred dollars. To address this, the newly-designed antivenom also needs to be cheap enough to manufacture that people actually buy it in large enough volumes that it justifies the initial R&D investment for the manufacturer.
__MatrixMan__
Is your second sentence supposed to be evidence of your first?
I'm no fan of a system that prices things differently based on how much the dying person (or their insurance) is likely to be able to pay, but in such a system you've got prices dictated by demand... can you really reason your way from prices back to notions of authentic supply?
fallingknife
You have to deregulate the supply. Right now you have to be specifically approved to manufacture a drug. This causes monopolies / oligopolies even in non-patented medications. It should be changed to a system where any company who wants can manufacture any drug as long as it meets purity and dosage accuracy standards.
os2warpman
>You have to deregulate the supply.
We already had that.
It was a disaster.
For centuries. No. Millennia.
Until enough people died to make regulation palatable.
Going back to that would be like going back to bloodletting to balance the four humors.
"Oh but baby we've changed" --some random private equity sociopath
"We've got computers now man that changes things, we'll build an ai-enabled pharma tech stack on the blockchain" --some techbro
snowwrestler
Does it actually cost $150k, or is that just the sticker price? What does United Healthcare pay for a dose? That’s the actual price.
Fake price tags are a huge issue in health care policy.
bob_theslob646
How is that possible?
Or one man with more than 200 bites and more than 700 injections of venom he prepared from some of the world's deadliest snakes[0].
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5d0l7el36o