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If you're bitten by a venomous snake, the medicine you need is antivenom. Unfortunately, antivenoms are species specific, meaning you need to have the right antivenom for the snake that bit you. Most of the time, people have no idea what species of snake has bitten them. And for some snakes, antivenoms are simply not available.
The antibodies in lab-made antivenoms could be 'humanized', a process that tricks your immune system into thinking foreign antibodies are your own antibodies. This might reduce the rate of severe side-effects that are commonly encountered with horse-derived antivenoms.One of the most important families of toxins in snake venoms are neurotoxins.
In our research, we describe the discovery and development of a lab-made humanized antibody that can neutralize key venom neurotoxins from diverse snakes from diverse regions. These results are particularly exciting as they show that generating lab-made antibodies that can broadly neutralize the effects of venoms from many species is feasible, making the development of a universal antivenom a realistic prospect.
We hope that once identified, these antibodies can be mixed with 95Mat5 to make an antivenom that is capable of neutralizing the venom of any snake, no matter what toxin types it possesses.
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