Biologists have designed a synthetic antitoxin antibody that can neutralize the lethal toxins secreted by different snakes.
The study, which was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, drew on the strategy of creating the monoclonal antibody used to detect venom-neutralising antibodies in HIV and COVID-19 patients.
“This is the first attempt to use this strategy for production of antibodies for treating the effects of snakebites,” said Senji Laxme, a PhD student at the Department of Biochemistry, IISc, Bengaluru.
The team, which was also rearly from the Scripps Research Institute in the US, highlighted that the study is a step closer to a universal antibody solution that will offer broad-spectrum protection against venam of a number of snakes including cobra, king cobra, krait, and black mamba.
Snakebites present thousands of death cases particularly in India and sub-Saharan Africa annually, according to them.
The practice of antivenom production includes inoculating horses, ponies and mules with snake venom, and collecting antibodies from their blood streams. Nevertheless, this method has a number of defects as well.
“These animals get exposed to various bacteria and viruses during their lifetime,” said Kartik Sunagar, Associate Professor at IISc and joint corresponding author of the study.
Hence the antivenoms also comprise antibodies against microorganisms, which are not required therapeutically. According to the studies, less than 10 per cent of a vial of antivenoms actually contain antibodies that are targeted towards the snake venoms.
The antibody that these researchers have devised targets a protected region of the 3FTx core domain that is found in the elapid venom.(PTI)
Because individual elapids produce different 3FTxs, merely a few regions of the proteins are the same, according to scientists.
The team pinpointed a conserved region that was of interest to them – a disulphide core. Antibody libraries from humans have been created by them, which were displayed on the yeast cell surfaces.
Finally they tested the ability of the antibodies to recognize 3FTx’s of different elapid snakes from across the world.
Then, a repeated screening process enabled the researchers to concentrate on one antibody that had a good binding ability with different 3FTxs. Among the 149 variants of 3FTxs in public repositories, we have shown that the antibody binds to 99, they said.
The scientists thereafter tested their antibody in animal models. In another RNA mix for the experiment, the synthetic antibody was pre-mixed with a 3FTx-toxin produced by Taiwanese krait. The mixture was injected into mice.(PTI)
In the case of mice, which received only the toxin in the first test, they died within four hours. That said, animals that received the concoction of toxins and antibodies survived past the 24 hours and appeared fine, tells us.
The team also used the antibody in entire venom of the India territory eastern monocled cobra and the sub-Saharan African’s black mamba and showed similar response.
The researchers said that the antibody was 15 times more efficacious than the conventional commercial medicine.(PTI)
