AI helped find “revolutionary” antidotes for snakebites

A groundbreaking study led by Nobel laureate David Baker and Timothy Patrick Jenkins has revealed innovative, computer-designed proteins that can neutralize deadly snake venom toxins, offering the potential for safer, more effective and more cost-effective treatments. The new approach will save the lives of millions of people who have been bitten by venomous snakes.

Breakthrough in treatment

The groundbreaking study is potentially a game-changer, offering a promising alternative to traditional antivenoms. The World Health Organization reports that venomous snakebites affect between 1.8 and 2.7 million people each year, resulting in an estimated 100,000 deaths and leaving three times as many disabled. Most of these cases occur in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where limited health infrastructure exacerbates the problem, reports 24 Kanal citing Nature.

Currently, the only antivenoms used to treat snakebites are made from the plasma of the animals themselves and are often expensive, have limited efficacy and adverse side effects.

Venoms also vary greatly depending on the species of snake. This means that for each case it is necessary to select an individual treatment method instead of having a universal method.

A team led by 2024 Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry David Baker of the University of Washington School of Medicine and Timothy Patrick Jenkins of the Technical University of Denmark used deep learning tools to design new proteins that bind to and neutralize deadly cobra toxins.

The study focuses on an important class of snake proteins called “triped toxins,” which are often the reason animal-based antivenoms fail to work. While they don't yet protect against full-blown snake venom, which is a complex mix of different toxins unique to each snake species, the new molecules, designed using artificial intelligence, provide protection against lethal doses of the three-pronged toxin in mice by at least 80%, and in some cases, 100%. The result depends on the exact dose, the toxin, and the protein designed.

These toxins are able to evade the immune system, making plasma treatment ineffective. Thus, this study demonstrates that the manual design of proteins with the help of artificial intelligence can be used to neutralize harmful substances that were previously difficult to combat.

I believe that protein design will help make snakebite treatment more accessible to people in developing countries. Antitoxins created by us are easy to detect using only computer methods. They are also cheap to manufacture and stable in laboratory tests,
– says Susana Vazquez Torres, a study author from Baker's lab at UW Medicine's Protein Design Institute.

Scientists believe that creating proteins that stick to snake toxins and inactivate them could offer several advantages over traditional treatments. The new antitoxins could be produced using microbes, bypassing traditional animal immunization and potentially reducing production costs.

There are other advantages, too. The advantage of these engineered proteins is that they are small — so small that scientists expect they will penetrate tissues better and potentially neutralize toxins more quickly than current antibodies. In addition, using AI reduces the time to create new drugs.

Future prospects and broader applications

While these results are encouraging, the team emphasizes that traditional antivenoms will remain the cornerstone of snakebite treatment for the foreseeable future. New computer-designed antivenoms could initially serve as additives or boosters that enhance the effectiveness of existing treatments until next-generation stand-alone treatments are approved.

The scientists believe that the drug development approach described in this study could also be useful for many other diseases that are currently untreatable, including some viral infections. Because manual protein design typically requires fewer resources than traditional laboratory-based drug discovery methods, there is also the potential to create new, yet less expensive, drugs for common diseases more quickly and easily using this approach.