"To develop the broad-spectrum antivenom, researchers exposed an alpaca and a llama to venoms from 18 of the most dangerous elapid snake species in sub-Saharan Africa. Elapids are venomous snakes characterized by erect fangs at the front of their mouths, and include cobras, mambas and rinkhals. The team isolated nanobodies - small versions of antibodies that can penetrate tissues and bind to tissue-destroying toxins - from the camelids. Eight of these nanobodies were combined into a single cocktail."
"Current antivenom treatments are made by injecting large animals, such as horses, with small doses of snake venom. The horses produce antibodies against the venom, and the horse plasma is extracted and used to treat bites in people. But these antivenoms are mostly specific to a single snake species. It can be difficult to identify the snake behind the bite, and that makes providing timely treatment difficult, says study co-author Anne Ljungars, a bioengineer at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby."
Snakebites kill roughly 20,000 people annually in sub-Saharan Africa and cause about 10,000 amputations from venom-induced tissue necrosis out of roughly 300,000 bites. Conventional antivenoms are produced by immunizing large animals such as horses and harvesting plasma, which yields species-specific antibodies that can provoke adverse immune reactions and fail to prevent local tissue death. Llama- and alpaca-derived nanobodies were raised against venoms from 18 African elapid species; eight nanobodies were combined into a single cocktail. When given to mice challenged with venom, the cocktail neutralized toxins from 17 species and reduced skin damage, offering a potentially broader, tissue-penetrating therapeutic approach.
Read at Nature
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