Get the latest tech news
One man, 856 venom hits, and the path to a universal snakebite cure
Over the course of 18 years, a truck mechanic from Wisconsin injected himself with snake venom hundreds of times. His actions were considered stunts by some over those years, but his blood has just helped lead the way toward a universal antivenom.
But Friede's videos are actually only the showy part of a self-immunization project he undertook for nearly two decades in which he injected himself over 800 times with increasingly high venom from a wide-range of serpents. Yet, by carrying out his snake-bite injection program over the years, Friede used his own body as a lab of sorts, allowing his biology to develop the necessary antibodies to the most potent of these toxins. “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 study lead author Peter Kwong from Columbia University.
Or read this on r/tech