Blood of a man who intentionally injected himself with blood venom 200 times in nearly two decades led to a life-saving snakebite treatment.
According to BBC, a US man named Tim Friede deliberately endured more than 200 bites and more than 700 injections of venom from some of the deadliest snakes, including cobras, mambas, rattlesnakes, taipans and kraits has now developed antibodies in the blood that could revolutionise antivenom.
His blood contains special antibodies that could protect people against numerous types of venomous snake bites and save thousands of lives, as it kills up to 140,000 people a year and leaves three times as many with amputations or permanent disabilities.
Motive behind over 200 snake bites
Initially, he wanted to build his immunity to protect himself from snake venoms while documenting his experience on YouTube.
The former truck mechanic told BBC that early on he had "completely screwed up" when two cobra bites in quick succession left him in a coma, adding, “I didn't want to die. I didn't want to lose a finger. I didn't want to miss work.”
He explained that later his motivation was to develop better therapies for the people, saying, “It just became a lifestyle, and I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing as hard as I could push for the people who are 8,000 miles away from me who die from snakebite."
‘Diamond in the rough’
Immunologist Jacob Glanville, after seeing media reports, contacted Friede, who agreed to work together with him and donated a 40-millilitre blood sample.
Glanville said, “The news articles were kind of flashy. ‘Crazy guy gets bitten by snakes.’ But I looked, and I was like, There’s a diamond in the rough here. We had this conversation. And I said, I know it’s awkward, but I’m really interested in looking at some of your blood. And he said, ‘Finally, I’ve been waiting for this call.’”
After eight years of research, Glanville and Peter Kwong, Richard J. Stock Professor of medical sciences at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, in research published in the scientific journal Cell, shared details of an antivenom experimented on mice that could protect against the bites from 19 species of poisonous snakes.
Glanville called it an "unparalleled" breadth of protection” that "likely covers a whole bunch of elapids for which there is no current antivenom."
The team of researchers is now experimenting to refine the antibodies further to see if adding a fourth component could lead to total protection against elapid snake venom.
