![]() Working with ion channels is also showing great promise in alleviating another common neurological affliction: epilepsy. These defects can be caused either through structural anomalies, or an abnormal number of channels. King specialises in nervous system disorders in which the underlying cause is a defect in nerve cells’ ion channels – tiny tunnels through membranes that let charged ions, like sodium, flow in and out of cells, triggering nerve firings. “This is the biggest issue we have: millions of people are left to the whims of what that stroke can do to their brain in the hours or days following it,” says Glenn King, a biochemist at Australia’s University of Queensland. But we still have no treatments that can prevent the neuronal damage due to oxygen starvation. The only drug approved by the FDA for this need is tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), which may be given to break up blood clots in the cerebral artery. Though it is the second leading cause of death worldwide, killing six million a year and leaving a further five million with permanent disabilities, we have no treatments that can heal or prevent brain damage following this loss of blood flow to the brain. One of the most promising areas of venom-derived medicines is in preventing permanent brain damage from stroke. These intricate poisons, many of which have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, have exquisite potency, stability, speed, and above all, precision to specific molecular targets. Though we may think of venoms as rarefied poisons that only a few species possess, 220,000 known animal species produce these chemical cocktails – fully 15% of all animal species. Numerous drugs are already available on pharmaceutical shelves: Enexatide, derived from the saliva of the Gila monster, prescribed for type two diabetes Ziconitide, extracted from cone snail venom, for chronic pain Eptifibatide, a synthetic modelled on the venom of the southern pygmy rattlesnake, administered to prevent heart attacks Batroxobin, extracted from South American pit vipers and used in several different blood treatments, including the appropriately named “ Reptilase” and Captopril, the first pharmaceutical derived from an animal, an anti-hypertensive approved by the US’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1981.Īlmost all of these animal-derived pharmaceuticals are sourced from venoms – some of the most complex chemical mixtures found on earth. Instead of having to laboriously milk snakes and scorpions for their venoms in order to analyse them, researchers can simply mine databases of codes to find peptides with specific properties. You would have had to look at them one by one, and it would have taken 10 years,” Beeton says. ![]() Fifteen years ago that wouldn’t have been possible. “Now we can screen hundreds of compounds in a month. ![]() This means that peptides from animals ranging from snails and spiders, to salamanders and snakes, can hone in on our own cellular components like a divining rod, with very precise effects. Thanks to evolution, we can find large molecules called peptides, which are siblings of molecules that exist in the human body, in other animals. She studies how peptides derived from venoms can be used to treat autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and myotonic dystrophy. “We have looked at plants for a long time, but we have only just scratched the surface with animals,” says Christine Beeton, an immunologist with the Baylor College of Medicine. The vaccine that could transform medicine.But that’s changing – meaning that while more future diseases are likely to come from animals, some of the most exciting drugs of the future will come from them, too. Unlike plants, from which people have been isolating specific compounds and turning them into medication for more than 100 years, in animals, specific molecules with medical potential have historically been too difficult to locate or extract. ![]() Thanks to modern technologies, no animal ingredients are required at any stage – just a DNA sequence. In fact, top scientists warned this week that our exploitation of wildlife is likely to lead to more frequent and deadly pandemics in the future.īut there might be a way to use wildlife responsibly, and that’s by studying their chemical ingredients at a molecular level. Up until recently pangolins, of which some species are critically endangered, were often raised at wildlife farms in China for their scales in TCM, and are thought to have been the source of Covid-19. The vast majority of these traditional remedies are not backed up by any scientific evidence – and the pursuit of animal parts has already contributed to several extinctions, including the western black rhino and northern white rhino.
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