If you've ever been stung by a wasp or bitten by a fire ant you know that venoms can be extremely painful. Some of them can be so toxic that they're fatal. In fact, venomous snakes alone can kill up to 100,000 people each year. But while venom can cause intense pain, a team of researchers have found a new way to use venom's untapped potential to do the exact opposite.
Biologists estimate that there are about 173,000 species of venomous animals creating various kinds of proteins and peptides that are thought to number in the ten millions. President of the World Toxin Bank Zoltan Takacs explains that every molecule in any given venom has its own target called an ion channel. They are the pores of a cell's surface, where information comes and goes. This information can include things like shoots of pain running along nerve cells.
There's just one problem: there's no way to know which one of these millions of molecules will do what until you test it out. Researchers have screened less than 2,000 of them and have come up with no more than 20 medicines.
To speed up venom testing, Michael N. Nitabach, an associate professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology and Genetics at Yale University and his colleagues have come up with a new method called 'toxineering' that works by screening for potential blockers of pain-specific channels. They tried it out with 100 toxins produced in several species of spiders and found a match. The Peruvian green velvet tarantula produced a molecule that stifles TRPA1, which is an ion channel responsible for certain kinds of chronic pain.
However you shouldn't be expecting to see any Peruvian tarantula extract on the shelf next to the aspirin at the drug store any time soon. Drug production can take decades and "we're not even out of the culture dish at this point," says Nitabach. Nonetheless, he has begun talk with drug companies and plans to begin scaling up toxineering to screen thousands more venoms.
