Tim Friday with Water Cobra
centivax
I know what it feels like to almost die from a snake bite. You can’t move. You can’t breathe. Your diaphragm is frozen. But you can hear everything. So when I was in the ICU, I could hear the doctors talking about me. “Why did he do it? Was it a suicide attempt?” And I say: No, it wasn’t like that. I just messed up.
In an effort to develop a treatment, I began injecting myself with snake venom in 2001. If we look at the statistics, 50 lakh people are bitten every year. there are 138,000 deaths every year and more than 400,000 amputations and other complications. Those are pretty big numbers.
There are organizations that want to help, like attack snakebite Global initiative, which aims to raise awareness about the effects of snake bite venom. and snake antidote, which was first invented 125 years ago Albert Calmette. But these have not changed much in that time, and are not complete. These are made by injecting horses with venom, then collecting the antibodies made by the horses. Using these in humans puts you at risk of anaphylactic shock because the antivenom is based on a foreign horse protein.
I wanted to get the horse out of the picture, but I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to lose even a single hand. I didn’t even want to leave work.
I had already taken a short course on extracting poison from spiders, scorpions and centipedes. That was in 1999. Therefore, it was not very difficult to extract the poison from the snake. I started with cobra venom, diluting it 1 in 10,000 and injecting it. You don’t feel those doses are too high. It’s like a tiny bee sting. But gradually over time, I increased the concentration to a lethal dose – to pure poison.
Then I was ready to be bitten by a live snake. This was nerve-wracking because I wasn’t sure how immune I was. I didn’t know if I would make it or not. There is no book on this. There is no school that can teach you how to do this. I had to teach myself and just use my body to experiment.
And it was a terrible start. That day was Wednesday 12 September 2001, 11:02 pm. I remember it clearly: I got bitten by a cobra, then waited for an hour and got bitten by the cobra again. I had no problem with the first one. But for the second one, I had no immunity because all my antibodies were bound to the venom of the first bite. At 12:00, I collapsed. Flattened. I was in a coma in the ICU for four days. They had to give me antivenom from the local zoo. I actually had antivenom at home, but the ambulance crew didn’t know this.
When I came out of the hospital, I realized: I could either quit because I messed up or I could learn from the experience and move on. I did the latter. I have been bitten over 200 times so far and have never used antivenom.
I got really serious about it. I started reaching out to scientists. Self-experimentation has a long history in medicine. I have a signed personal letter from Barry Marshall, who self-healed and won a Nobel Prize. I also spoke to Peter Doherty, another Nobel laureate for immunity. And I say: “Oh crap, these people actually take me seriously.” So that’s when I really got into the academic world, studying poisons.
The venom of a snake, even if it belongs to the same genus and species, can be completely different. The perfect example of this is the brown snake, Pseudonaja textilisin Australia. In Queensland, in the north, its venom is different than in the south. And that’s the problem with antivenom: They make it for a certain area, so it may not work in another area.
I wanted to develop broad-spectrum antibodies in my blood that could protect against all poisons. So I kept working with different snakes from all over the world. There are about 650 species of venomous snakes out there and I knew I wouldn’t put the venom of all of them in my body because I couldn’t reach them all. I just tried to pick the most dangerous snakes I could find: Taipans – they’re the most venomous snakes in the world – cobras, kraits, coral snakes, rattlesnakes.
It is actually very easy to cut a Taipan. This is quite pure neurotoxin. But vipers and pit-vipers have poison Necrotic components that destroy muscles. He is completely different. The pain is huge.
So far, I have been studied six times in 25 years. That was the most important thing for me. I wanted me to be studied because if I wasn’t studied, I couldn’t contribute to new antivenoms. The most recent is the most important. jacob glanville The vaccine company Centivax contacted me because of a YouTube video I made that showed a black mamba bite and a taipan bite back to back. I sent him blood and he extracted DNA from my B-cells to clone my IgG antibodies. Then we started doing in-vivo studies with rats.
The studies were very intensive, but the laboratory is very good. I found out – and this is very sad – that we can neutralize the venom of the king cobra (ophiophagus hannah) with my antibodies, and I have never used king cobras in my experiments. This gave us hope that we could reach a broad-spectrum level, a universal antivenom.
Last year this paper was published in SAIL Press. It took almost 25 years to reach that newspaper. My name is not in the author list. I used myself as a test subject and some people in academia look down on that. When my name was on the author list we were thrown out of many magazines, refused publication. But I have no problem with it. I don’t want praise.
It will still take a very long time to get an antivenom from rats that we can use in humans, but I don’t mind waiting. I will wait until I die. But I can sleep really well at night knowing that I did everything I could to make a difference.
As told to Colin Barras
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