The video has just under two and a half minutes. An intelligent man with closed harvest hair enters a room, pulls a long black mamba whose poison can kill in an hour of a box and allows him to bite his left arm. Immediately afterwards, hey a taipan of Papua New Guinea to bite his right arm. “Thanks for looking,” he tells the camera calmly, his left arm bleeding, and then comes out.
Approximately 18 years, the man, Tim Friede, 57, was injected with more than 650 doses or venom carefully calibrated, growing to develop his immunity to 16 species of mortal snakes. Hey, allowed snakes, mainly one at a time, but sometimes two, as in the video, sink their acute fangs in it about 200 times.
This little Daredevilry (a name) can now help solve a severe global health problem. More than 600 species of poisonous snakes roam the earth, biting up to 2.7 million people, killing about 120,000 people and mutilating 400,000 others, the numbers are believed to be underestimated.
In Mr. Friede’s blood, scientists say they have identified antibodies that are able to neutralize the poison of multiple snake species, a step towards the creation of a universal antivvenom, they reported Friday in Cell magazine.
“I am really proud to be able to do something in life for humanity, to make a difference for people who are 8,000 miles away, that I will never know myself, I will never talk, probably,” said Mr. Friede, who lives in two rivers, Wisconsin, where poisonous snakes are not a threat.
While deforestation, human zeal and climate change have captured the danger of snake attacks in recent years, antivename research has not followed the rhythm of demand.
“This is a major problem that the first world realizes,” said Jacob Glanville, founder and executive director of Centivax, a company that aims to produce vaccines of broad spectrum and main author in the study.
Dr. Glanville and his colleagues discovered that two powerful blood antibodies of Mr. Freide, when combined with a drug that blocks neurotoxins, protected the venom mice of 19 species of mortal snakes of a large family found in different geographical regions.
This is an extraordinary feat, according to experts who are not involved at work. Most anti -vain can counteract the poison of only one or a few species of related snakes from a region.
The study suggests that antitoxin cocktails can successfully prevent deaths and injuries of all snake families, said Nicholas Casewell, a researcher at Liverpool’s Tropical Medicine School in England.
“The principles of this study can definitely be applied to other snakes,” he said.
Mr. Friede’s first snake encounter, a harmless bite of a league snake at 5 years, began a life fascination. “If I only knew at that time what was going to happen,” he recalled, laughing at UPR and Prarary.
But he did not begin to venture with serpents seriously until he was married to children and working on construction. He is experiencing with Scorpions around 2000, but quickly changed snakes. At one time, his basement laboratory housed 60 poisonous snakes.
His experiments almost ended shortly after begging. On September 12, 2001, crazy about the terrorist attack of the previous day and by the death of a friend a few days before, two cobras bit him. They were his first snakes live, and he had not accumulated enough immunity. It was fine after the first bite, but after the second, he felt cold, his eyes began to fall and could not speak. He passed out and woke up from a coma in a hospital four days later.
His wife was furious, but he was more angry with himself. He promised to be more methodical in his work, carefully measuring doses of poison and timing his bites.
“I would work all day, I would return home, play with the children and the family, and I went down and did my things all night, wake up and do it again,” he said.
There were other missionary: accidental bites, anaphylactic clashes, hives, blackouts. Mr. Friede describes himself as a scientist not abundant, but “there is no university in the world that can teach him how to do it,” he said. “I was doing only the best I could.”
Two teams of scientists tested the blood of Mr. Friede over the years, but Neinder Project led anywhere. For the time with Dr. Glanville, in 2017, he was almost ready to give up.
Dr. Glanville had been studying what scientists call widely acted as basics for universal vaccines against viruses. He grew up in a Mayan village in the highlands of Guatemala, and was intrigued by the possibility of using the same approach to the Universal Antivvenom.
At first, he said, he had a “humble” objective of finding some as a clumsy snake researcher who had bitten his legs a couple of times. But then he found news articles about Mr. Friede.
“I’ve been waiting for this call for a long time,” says Dr. Glanville to Mr. Friede.
In collaboration with Peter Kwong, an immunologist at Columbia University, Dr. Glanville isolated Blood actors from Mr. Friede and created the combined treatment.
The researchers tested Blood antibodies of Mr. Friede against the poison of 19 snake species. A widely neutralizing antibody identified protected mice of six of the species. Add a small molecule called VARESPLADIB and a second antibody totally protected to mice against 13 snake species, and provided a partial defense against the remaining six.
Cobras and mambas produce toxins that paralyze neurons. The venom of snakes in the Viper family increases the tissues, which makes the victims bleed until death. Each species of snake within these families produces a different mixture of doxes of toxins, and the poison even within a species can vary by region, age, diet and season.
But Antivenom is done in the same way that it was 130 years ago when it occurred for the first time. A small amount of poison to a horse, camel or sheep is pumped, and the antibodies produced in response are harvested. The antibodies tend to be specific to the type of venom injected and do little to relieve the symptoms of other types of snakes.
In fact, many anti -venations can pose more serious problems that Venom Itelf, because mammal proteins can trigger an mortal allergic shock.
Scientists seek treatments that would avoid this side effect. Small molecule medication cocktails and monoclonal antibodies (artificial copies made of powerful human antibodies, against the most important toxins families can neutralize the poison of many species, said Dr. Casewell.
The researchers then plan to test the treatment in Australia in any dog ​​that are in veterinary clinics for snake coils. They also hope to identify another component, perhaps also from Mr. Friede’s blood, which would extend complete protection to the 19 snake species that were subject to research.
However, Mr. Friede himself is already made. His last bite was in November 2018, of a water collection. He was divorced: his wife and children had moved. “Well, that’s all, it’s enough,” he said he thought.
I miss snakes, he said, but not painful bites. “I will probably do it again in the future,” he said. “But for now, I am happy where things are.”
