How to Transform Lethal Venom into Life-changing Drugs

Read the papers and it seems that the health sector lurches from one crises to another. Some of the stories may be newspaper hyperbole, but one crisis that is very real is the rise of the superbugs. Hospital wards closed and flesh eating bugs are stories that highlight the very real problem affecting drug treatments as the bugs get the better of our antibiotics.

But one British company is fighting back against the superbugs and may also help to find medicines to fight other illnesses too. Welcome to the world of Venomtech — a UK company hoping to turn venom into medicines.

Rise of the superbugs

There is no definitive definition of what a superbug is — but, one definition is a bacterium that cannot be killed using several antibiotics. They affect millions of people every year and cause countless deaths. Any species of bacteria can become a superbug by evolving a resistance to the antibiotics we use to defeat them.

The misuse of antibiotics is one of the biggest contributors to the problem of antibiotic resistance. Patients asking for antibiotics when they don’t really need them or not completing a course of drugs are two examples of antibiotic misuse — but this is where the company Venomtech enter the equation.

Venom into medicine

Venomtech were formed by Steven Trim, a molecular biologist who worked in drug discovery. One of the problems he had as a scientist working on drug discovery was finding good drug candidates — especially when using conventional chemical libraries. Chemical libraries store molecules that can be used for high-throughput screening in the drug discovery process.

Venomtech’s aim is to create a chemical library of peptides. But the difference is the starting point — venom from deadly insects and snakes. Venom is made of hundreds of different chemical compounds but only a few of the compounds are of interest — peptides.

The company extract the venom in a humane way — with the utmost respect for the welfare of the animals. For spiders, this involves anaesthetising them and applying a gentle electrical stimulation to cause the venom gland muscles to contract — producing a small amount of venom. The animals awake back in their own enclosures.

Separating the peptides

The venom is then separated using high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) to allow the researchers to isolate peptides that might be suitable for testing as drug precursors. Developments in HPLC — a key tool in drug discovery programmes — are discussed in the article, Recent Developments in Support Materials for use in High Performance Liquid Chromatography.

The company’s library is providing starter molecules that could be used to develop not only drugs to defeat superbugs — but also drugs for cancer and heart diseases. So the next time you’re ready to crush that spider think again — his buddy is helping to fight superbugs.