TURNING TOXINS TO THERAPIES

RESEARCHING VENOM can be a hazardous pursuit. Ask Associate Professor Bryan Fry. This Brisbane-based molecular biologist has been bitten 27 times by venomous creatures, mostly snakes on land and box jellyfish and stingrays at sea. He’s also had 23 broken bones and 400 stitches, has been concussed three times and once fractured his spine in three places, after which he spent months in hospital relearning how to walk.

Bryan is no masochist. But if you study venom, you need to go into some wild places and confront a lot of deadly creatures to collect the material that’s fundamental to your research. It may be dangerous, but it’s necessary, because Bryan’s work with the venoms he collects is crucial to making the antidotes – the antivenoms – needed to treat the millions of people bitten around the world each year by venomous animals.

Of course, there’s no one antivenom that works across all species: each needs to match the toxins of a particular species. To make matters more complicated, the toxins can vary widely within the same species, depending on the environment they live in and the prey they take. Without a detailed understanding of exactly what’s in a venom, it’s not possible to predict how the human body will react to it, what organs will be affected and how to treat a patient.

“There is a global database of antivenoms maintained by the World Health Organization, but it’s based on what is known about each species of snake,” explains Bryan, who heads the Venom Evolution Lab at the University of Queensland (UQ). “How well these have been tested against the full geographic range of any particular snake, or how it performs against snakes that are close relatives and may therefore have some cross-reactivity, we just don’t know.”

Much of the lab’s time is taken up delving into the extraordinary complexity of venoms. And that means so much more than just determining what toxins make up the venoms of the world’s