Living in countries like the U.S., Australia, and the U.K., it can be all too easy to forget that snakebites are a serious and neglected global medical problem. It’s estimated that upwards of 4.5 million people are envenomated by snakes every year; about half of them suffer serious injuries including loss of limbs, and more than 100,000 die from such bites.
Much of this morbidity and mortality could be prevented if faster, easier access to the therapeutics that target and inactivate snake venom toxins could be established. But effective antivenoms are difficult to produce, expensive, and usually require storage and handling measures such as refrigeration that simply aren’t possible in the rural, remote areas where venomous snakes take their toll. Seeking to solve many of the issues, a new wave of researchers have begun the search for alternatives, hoping to find stable, cheap, and effective broad-spectrum antidotes to snake venom toxins. One such group at the University of California Irvine recently announced a promising new candidate: a nanogel that can neutralize one of the most dangerous families of protein toxins found in snake venoms.
In a press release published last week, the scientific team—led by chemistry professor Ken Shea—drew attention to their most recent paper unveiling the new possible therapeutic, which was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in December with Shea’s Ph.D. student, Jeffrey O’Brien, as lead author. The team dubbed the polymer nanogel material, which consists of readily available acrylamide derivates, a “nanodote.” Continue reading “Is a new ‘nanodote’ the next big thing in snakebite treatment? Not yet.”
