The deadly venoms delivered by snakes, spiders and scorpions
aren’t the most obvious source of ingredients to soothe our aches
and pains and make us well. After all, these toxic cocktails are made to incapacitate and kill. And yet animal venoms are proving to be a wellspring of molecules that could become powerful new drugs for everything from chronic pain to multiple sclerosis and cancer.
Venom is a rich broth of thousands of different molecules designed to evade the victim’s immune system and seek out their targets. They stick onto cell fragments in the blood to prevent clotting, for example, or block surface receptors on nerve cells to shut down the nervous system. “These peptides [the building blocks of proteins] have been optimised over hundreds of millions of years of evolution to hit their molecular targets with high potency and selectivity,” says Dr Eric Lingueglia of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology in Valbonne, France.