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Toxic Proteins for Drug Discovery

Toxic amino acids, peptides, and proteins — which first evolved as molecular weapons deployed by species in conflict — can also serve as blueprints for pharmaceutical innovation.

The way we typically prepare white beans completely deactivates the mild toxin that could otherwise cause food poisoning, the highly venomous cone snail that produced that shell was long gone by the time you picked it up, and Botox has been safe to inject by licensed healthcare professionals since FDA approval in 1991. In 2021, Ornithologist Dr. Carlos Daniel Cadena, Dean of Science at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, introduced me to his colleague Dr. Camila González-Rosas, who studies these toxic caterpillars in South America, where they kill several people every year. His fascination with toxic organisms began during childhood explorations in Minnesota's boreal forest and has taken him from the Galápagos Islands for his dissertation research to the molecular biology laboratories of Harvard, and eventually Berkeley, where he studies how species evolve to produce and resist deadly chemicals.

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