Nature
PUBLISHED
2
It was in September of 2001 that, in a moment of madness, Tim Friede first let a venomous cobra bite him. The pain was, he told NPR last year, “like a bee sting times a thousand”; after two bites, he recalled, “I was put in ICU […] and I dropped in a coma for four days.”
Friede had already acquired some amount of immunity to the snake’s venom – enough to withstand one bite, but not both. That resistance came not from earlier bites, though, but from two years of painstaking amateur home antivenom production: a lifelong snake owner, he started milking his pets for their venom and injecting himself with small, diluted samples of it. “It was hard because there’s no book on it,” he told National Geographic in 2023. “So I figured it out by taking lots of notes and lots of photos.”
It's a maverick approach to antivenom production, and certainly one that no expert recommends. But now it’s done – and it there’s a small chance it might save millions.
How to make an antivenom
Fall foul of a venomous snake, and time is your enemy. You have, ideally, about four hours to obtain medical attention; a course of antivenom should be administered via injection or IV, so the treatment can take effect as quickly as possible.
It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But the devil is in the details: there are around 600 species of venomous snake in the world, each with its own unique cocktail of toxins pumping out of its glands. Sometimes, the venom is different even to individual snakes, being influenced by things like age, diet, and geography.
As a result, antivenoms are rarely standardized. The process to make them is well-established, but it’s also long and difficult: first, you must milk the fangs of thousands of snakes; next, the collected venom, mixed with an adjuvant to stimulate the immune system, is injected into a large host animal in increasingly high levels – horses are most often chosen, as “they’re friendly animals with big veins and they have long lives,” Leslie Boyer, a physician and head of the VIPER Institute at the University of Arizona, told Popular Mechanics back in 2011.
“Sharks make nice antibodies,” she added, “but obviously aren't easy to work with.”
Exactly how, when, and which venoms are used in this step are often highly guarded secrets, Boyer explained – but the overall effect is the same: the horse’s immune system starts producing antibodies against the particular toxins making up the venom or venoms it was given, peaking after about eight to 10 weeks of injections. At that point, the horse is ready to be bled: 3 to 6 liters (101-203 ounces) of blood is taken, filtered for the plasma, and the active antibodies are extracted.
Any deviation in the process, or even the particular snakes whose venom was used, can make tiny but important changes to the resulting antivenom’s efficacy. Generalized, or “polyvalent”, antivenoms are even more tricky to perfect: since each snake’s venom can include more than 100 different proteins, using more than, say, five in one host animal can simply overwhelm the immune system, resulting in some of the toxins just going ignored.
Even after all that, there’s a real chance the antivenom itself may kill you. It’s made in a horse, for goodness’ sake: “The serum is recognised as a horse antibody,” Christiane Berger-Schaffitzel, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Bristol who researches snakebite therapies, told National Geographic. “It’s not supposed to be injected into humans.”
Overall, it’s expensive, time-consuming, and not always safe or effective. Worse, it’s the best option we have right now – and it’s running out. So… could there be a better way?
The men with antivenomous blood
Friede had a simple ambition: “I wanted to take the worst snakes on the planet and beat them,” he told National Geographic. But after hundreds of bites from some of the deadliest snakes on Earth, his motivation evolved; now, his legacy is as a human Petri dish, from which a new and potentially universal antivenom might be discovered.
That change came in part thanks to Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, a biotech company that aims to produce broad-spectrum vaccines and antivenoms. Rather than the more-than-a-century-old horse blood-based method of antivenom production, he figured there must be a more elegant solution out there – a way of perhaps targeting protein-binding sites common to toxins from multiple snakes, ideally using human, rather than horse, antibodies.
Of course, that would require a human who had been exposed to way more snake bites than the average person.
“I was calling vivariums hoping for a clumsy snake researcher,” Glanville told NPR – but instead, it was YouTube that came to his rescue. He found a video one day of a man coaxing a Papua New Guinea taipan, one of the most dangerous snakes on the planet, to bite him – and inspiration struck. “If anybody has broken through the problem of getting the immune system to focus, it's this guy,” Glanville said, “by this repeated stimulation with all these snakes.”
It was an idea with precedent, of a sort. Bill Haast, a Floridian born in 1910, was bitten at least 172 times by venomous snakes throughout his full century of life, and despite his more popular reputation as a showman snake handler, he kind of revolutionized the fields of herpetology and venom research.
He pioneered venom collection methods, and ways to freeze-dry it cheaply and quickly – techniques that are still in use today. He helped create the world’s first coral snake antivenom. And, like Friede, he injected it into himself, using his own body as a laboratory to create antivenom antibodies.
Haast may have a… mixed reputation today, but those antibodies running through his veins are undeniably one of the highlights. He donated his blood to 21 snakebite victims around the world at various times, even being made an honorary citizen of Venezuela after he travelled into the jungle to help save a young snake-bitten boy.
So it makes sense that researchers might want to apply a more rigorous approach to what seems to have been a lifesaving technique on the fly. In 2013, researchers at the University of Copenhagen contacted the UK’s Steve Ludwin to do just that: a snake enthusiast from the UK who had been injecting himself with snake venom for decades after meeting Haast as a child, Ludwin was “the key to everything,” Brian Lohse, an associate professor in chemical and molecular biology at Copenhagen, told CNN in 2016.
A recipe for ssssssuccess
With Friede’s blood, success seems to be coming fast and easy – or at least, as easy as things in molecular biology ever are.
Analysis of Friede’s antibodies yielded the discovery of Centi-LNX-D9, an antibody which, when cloned and administered to lab mice, “provided complete broadly neutralizing protection against whole venom from monocled cobra, black mamba, yellow-lipped sea krait, Egyptian cobra, cape cobra, Indian cobra and king cobra,” Glanville told National Geographic.
A second of Friede’s antibodies, plus a drug called varespladib which is known to protect against certain venoms, gave “a dramatically unparalleled breadth of full protection for 13 of the 19 species and then partial protection for the remaining that we looked at,” Glanville said in a statement last year.
“We were looking down at our list and thought, ‘what’s that fourth agent’?” he said. “And if we could neutralize that, do we get further protection?”
It’s not the first broad-spectrum antivenom by any measure, but it is the first to use lab-created monoclonal antibodies. But while the results have been encouraging, they are of course only confirmed in mice – human trials are a long way away.
In the meantime, Glanville’s team hope to expand the Friede-based cocktail to include venoms from vipers as well: “We’re turning the crank now, setting up reagents to go through this iterative process of saying what’s the minimum sufficient cocktail to provide broad protection against venom from the viperids,” said Peter Kwong, Richard J. Stock professor of medical sciences at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and collaborator on the Centivax project.
“The final contemplated product would be a single, pan-antivenom cocktail,” Kwong said, “or we potentially would make two: one that is for the elapids and another that is for the viperids”. That would be a workable solution, he said, “because some areas of the world only have one or the other.”
If successful, it would be a vital lifeline – quite literally – for the millions of people across the world who get bitten by venomous snakes each year. The grand plan, for Glanville at least, is to find a universal antivenom that can be produced at scale for low cost – “Most of those people [who die from snake bites] are poor,” he told National Geographic. “Most of the neglected tropical diseases are viewed as less profitable than other areas such as cancer or neurodegeneration that lots of rich people die from and would pay lots more money to cure.”
And for Friede, literally the lifeblood of the entire project, that’s a much better motivation than mere experimentation with venomous pets.
“I’m really proud that I can do something in life for humanity, to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away,” he told the New York Times in 2025. “[People] that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably.”
