The video is just two and a half minutes. A thin man with short hair walks in a room, pulls a long black mamba-whose poison can kill in an hour-from a box and allows him to bite his left hand. Immediately afterwards, he lets a Taipan from Papua New Guinea bite his right hand. “Thanks for watching,” says the camera calmly, his left hand bleeds and then comes out.
For over 18 years, man, Tim Friede, 57, has put himself in a carefully calibrated, stalemate doses of poison to build his immunity into 16 deadly snake species. He also allowed the snakes – mainly one at a time, but sometimes two, as in the video – to sink their sharp caninees about 200 times.
This part of Daredevilry (a name for it) can now help solve an unpleasant global health problem. More than 600 species of poisonous snakes roam the Earth, biting up to 2.7 million people, killing about 120,000 people and alleviating 400,000 others – the numbers believed to be huge devaluation.
In Mr Friede’s blood, scientists say they have identified antibodies that are capable of neutralizing the poison of multiple species of snakes, one step towards creating a universal opposing, reported on Friday at Cell magazine.
“I am really proud to be able to do something in life for humanity, make the difference for people who are 8,000 miles, which I will never meet, I will never speak, I will never see,” said Mr Friede, who lives in two rivers.
While degradation, human spread and climate change have increased the risk of snake attacks in recent years, AntiVInom research has not been in line with demand.
“This is a bigger problem than the first world realizes,” said Jacob Glanville, founder and chief executive of Cervax, a company that aims to produce wide range vaccines and lead a writer to the study.
Dr. Glanville and his colleagues found that two powerful antibodies from Mr Freide’s blood, when combined with a drug that prevents neurotoxins, protected mice from poisoning 19 deadly snake species of a large family found in different geographical areas.
This is an excellent achievement, according to experts who are not involved in the project. Most AntiVenoms can deal with the poison from a single or a few related species of snakes from one area.
The study suggests that antitoxin cocktails can successfully prevent deaths and injuries from all snake families, said Nicholas Casewell, a researcher at the Liverpool Tropical Medicine School in England.
“The principles of this study can definitely be applied to other snakes,” he said.
Mr Friede’s first snake meeting, a harmless bite of a garter snake at the age of 5, began a lifelong charm. “If I only knew what would happen,” he recalled, laughing unacceptably.
But he didn’t start beating snakes seriously until she got married with children and working in construction. He began experimenting with the Scorpions around 2000, but quickly changed to snakes. At one point, its underground laboratory houses 60 poisonous snakes.
His experiments were almost finished soon after the start. On September 12, 2001, crazy about the previous day’s terrorist attack and a friend’s death a few days earlier, he let himself bite on two cobras. It was his first bites of live snakes and had not created enough immunity. It was fine after the first bite, but after the second, he felt cold, his eyes began to fall and he couldn’t speak. He took out and woke up from a coma in a hospital four days later.
His wife was furious, but he was more angry with himself. He vowed to become more methodical in his work, to carefully measure the doses of the poison and to delay his bites.
“I had worked all day, I come home, I play with the kids and the family, and go down and do my things all night, wake up and do it again,” he said.
There were other misfortunes – random bites, anaphylactic shocks, hives, holidays. Mr Friede describes himself as a zero scientist, but “there is no college in the world that can teach you how to do it,” he said. “I did it myself as best I could.”
Two teams of scientists sampling Mr Friede’s blood over the years, nor did the work lead anywhere. Until he met Dr. Glanville in 2017, he was almost ready to leave.
Dr. Glanville seeks what scientists generally call antibodies as a basis for universal vaccines against viruses. He grew up in a Maya village in Guatemala’s highlands and became excited about using the same approach for the Universal Antivivnom.
Initially, he said, he had a “humble” goal of finding someone like a clumsy snake researcher who had sometimes bitten. But then he found news articles about Mr Friede.
“I’ve been waiting for this call for a long time,” says Dr. Glanville, Mr Friede said.
In collaboration with Peter Kwong, an immunologist at Columbia University, Dr. Glanville generally isolated Mr Friede’s blood antibodies and created the combined treatment.
The researchers examined Mr Friede’s blood antibodies against Venom from 19 species of snakes. A widely neutralized antibody that found protected mice from six of the species. Add a small molecule called VareSpladib and a second antibody fully protected mice against 13 species of snakes and provided partial defense against the other six.
Cobras and Mambas produce toxins that paralyze neurons. The venom from the snakes in the Viper family tears tissues, causing victims to bleed to death. Each species of snake within these families produces a separate mixture of dozens of toxins and the poison even in one species can vary depending on the area, age, nutrition and season.
But antivnom is done in the same way that it was 130 years ago when it was first created. A small amount of poison is pumped on horse, camel or sheep and the antibodies produced in response are collected. The antibodies tend to be specific to the type of poison injected and to do little to facilitate symptoms from other types of snakes.
Many disadvantages, in fact, can cause more serious problems than the poison itself, because mammal proteins can cause a fatal allergic shock.
Scientists follow treatments that will avoid this side effect. Cocktails of small molecules and monoclonal antibodies – artificial copies of powerful human antibodies – against the most important toxin families can be able to neutralize the poison of many species, Dr. Casewell said.
The researchers next plan to test the treatment in Australia in any dogs transported to veterinary clinics for snakebites. They also hope to identify another element, perhaps from the blood of Mr Friede, who will extend complete protection to all 19 species of snakes that were subjects of research.
However, Mr Friede himself is being done now. His last bite was in November 2018, from a Cobra Water. He had divorced – his wife and his children had moved. “Well, that’s, enough is enough,” thought.
He loses snakes, he said, but not the painful bites. “I will probably come back to the future,” he said. “But for now, I’m happy to be things.”
