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worldwide are bitten by snakes each year. Of those, up to 138,000 die and another 400,000 end up with permanent scarring and disability.that can't be treated with current antivenoms. We have discovered that cheap, readily available blood-thinning medications can be repurposed as antidotes for these venoms.gene-editing technology we learned more about how these venoms attack our cells, and found out that a common class of drugs calledare made up of many different compounds.
What's more, antivenoms can't prevent local tissue damage. This is mainly because the antibodies that make up antivenoms are too large to reach peripheral tissue, such as a limb.Our team – at the University of Sydney in Australia, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom and Instituto Clodomiro Picado in Costa Rica – set out to look for other options to treat snakebites.
We took a large mixture of human cells and used CRISPR gene-editing technology to disable a different gene from across the whole human genome in each cell. CRISPR technology uses a special enzyme to remove or change specific parts of the DNA in a cell. We found various cobra venoms need particular enzymes to kill human cells. These enzymes are responsible for making long sugar molecules called
We tested this drug on human cells to see if flooding the system with free heparin could be used as a decoy target for the venom. Remarkably, this worked and the venoms no longer caused cell death, even when the heparin was added to cells after the venom.
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