New hope for treating lethal snakebites

Current antivenoms used to treat human snakebite victims aren't always effective. However, a recent study by Kartik Sunagar at the Indian Institute of Science and his colleagues identified an antibody that could protect mice against a potent toxin produced by snakes such as cobras, kraits, and mambas ( Sci. Transl. Med. 2024, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.adk1867 ). The research team relied on a library containing billions of artificially designed human antibodies to ultimately find a good candidate called 95Mat5. To treat snakebites, clinicians typically use a cocktail of antibodies that animals such as horses make when they're injected with low doses of snake venom. But only a small percentage of those antibodies are therapeutically relevant, and the antibodies work best against only the venom from snake species used to elicit the horses' response. That makes treating bites challenging when other snake species or populations whose venom protein composition is highly variable are