Universal Antivenom, Exploding Stars That Forge Gold, and a New type 5 Diabetes Crisis: Science Stories You Can’t Ignore

Universal antivenom developed using blood of a man with 200 self-inflicted snakebites

ANTIVENOM is currently produced using a century-old technique that involves immunising horses or sheep with venom from a single snake species and extracting the resulting antibodies from their blood. The process is effective, but the antivenom contains non-human antibodies, and this could lead to adverse reaction in patients. Also, treatments tend to be species- and region-specific.

While exploring ways to improve this process, scientists learnt of Tim Friede, a self-taught herpetologist and venom expert who has self-induced hyperimmunity against snake neurotoxins arising from over 200 self-inflicted snakebites. Using antibodies from his blood, the scientists were able to develop the most broadly effective antivenom to date. The work was described in the May 2 issue of Cell.

“[F]or nearly 18 years, [Friede] had undertaken hundreds of bites and self-immunisations with escalating doses from 16 species of very lethal snakes that would normally a kill a horse,” said Jacob Glanville, CEO of the California-based biotechnology company Centivax and the first author.

After Friede agreed to participate in the study, researchers found that he had generated antibodies that were effective against several snake neurotoxins at once. “Not only did he potentially create these broadly neutralising antibodies, in this case, it could give rise to a broad-spectrum or universal antivenom,” Glanville said commenting on this unique immune history.

To develop the antivenom, the team first created a testing panel with 19 of the WHO’s category 1 and 2 deadliest snakes across the elapid family, a group that contains roughly half of all venomous species, including coral snakes, mambas, cobras, taipans, and kraits. Next, researchers isolated target antibodies from Friede’s blood that reacted with neurotoxins found within the snake species tested. The antibodies were tested in mice injected with the venom of the panel species. Thus, a cocktail comprising a minimum but sufficient number of components to render all the venoms ineffective was built systematically.

The antivenom thus developed comprises three components: two antibodies isolated from the donor (LNX-D09 and SNX-B03) and the toxin inhibitor varespladib. LNX-D09 protected mice from a lethal dose of venom from six species in the panel. While the addition of varespladib granted protection against three more species, the inclusion of SNX-B03 extended protection across the full panel.

The final cocktail was found to give full protection against 13 species and partial protection against the remaining 6 in the panel. The results suggest that the three-part cocktail could be effective against many other, if not most, elapid snakes.

The team now plans to test its efficacy out in the field, beginning with dogs. The next idea is to develop an antivenom targeting vipers, the other major snake family. The lead author Richard J. Stock of Columbia University said the final goal was “a single, pan-antivenom cocktail or we potentially would make two: one that is for the elapids and another that is for the viperids because some areas of the world only have one or the other”.

Magnetar ejections likely source of heavy elements in the cosmos

THE origins of heavy elements in nature had for long been a mystery, with astronomers theorising about the sources of some of the heaviest elements like gold, uranium, and platinum. While they knew that these elements could only form in special conditions through rapid-neutron capture (the r-process), which occurs via a set of unique and complex nuclear reactions, unwittingly, they had overlooked the role of magnetars—which are highly magnetised neutron stars, essentially dead remnants of supernovae—in early galaxy formation, said Todd Thompson of Ohio State University, co-author of the study that was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Scientists saw the r-process in action when they detected the collision of two super-dense neutron stars in 2017. This event—captured using NASA telescopes, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, and other instruments—provided the first direct evidence of the creation of heavy metals by celestial forces.

But it also became clear that other mechanisms are needed to account for all these elements as neutron star collisions might not produce heavy elements fast enough in the early universe. Building on these ideas, Thompson and his collaborators theorised that powerful magnetar flares could indeed serve as potential ejectors of heavy elements. This was confirmed by when researchers took a fresh look at 20-year-old observations of the extremely bright flare from the magnetar SGR 1806-20, the most magnetised object known.

By analysing this magnetar flare event, researchers determined that the radioactive decay of the newly created elements matched their theoretical predictions about the timing and types of energies released by a magnetar flare after it ejected heavy r-process elements. They estimated that up to 10 per cent of heavy elements in our galaxy are from the massive cosmic flares.

Not only do magnetars produce valuable metals like gold and silver that end up on the earth, the supernova explosions that cause them also produce elements like oxygen, carbon, and iron that are vital for many other, more complex celestial processes.

“All of that material they eject gets mixed into the next generation of planets and stars,” said Thompson. “Billions of years later, those atoms are incorporated into what could potentially amount to life.”

New diabetes type officially recognised

Malnutrition-related diabetes, distinct from both type 1 and type 2, has now been officially recognised and named “type 5 diabetes”.

The International Diabetes Federation’s World Diabetes Congress, held in Bangkok, Thailand, endorsed this new category on April 8. According to the online portal Medscape, a panel met in India in January to draft a consensus statement about the condition. The portal quoted the American expert Dr Meredith Hawkins as saying: “Malnutrition-related diabetes has historically been vastly underdiagnosed and poorly understood.”

Malnutrition-related diabetes was first identified in Jamaica in 1955. But there was a lack of consensus within the medical community about it all these years. Although the WHO officially classified this condition as a distinct diabetes type in 1985, it removed the category in 1999 due to poor evidence that malnutrition or protein deficiency caused diabetes.