Tim Friede
speaker
39 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Tim Friede’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So he found his way to Tim and called him up. Tim remembers Jacob saying to him, You're the guy I'm looking for.
We need your blood. We need your antibodies. I'm like... Wow. Cool. Great.
Well, once Tim agreed to participate, Jacob got a blood sample from him and he scanned it for its immune memory. He searched the troves of antibodies for those that neutralize the neurotoxins of multiple snakes.
The antibody, which has a name that's just a string of letters and numbers like a license plate, gave mice full protection against five snakes, the black mamba, and a mix of cobras. So Jacob and his colleagues wrote the journal Cell to gauge their interest in publishing the research. One of those colleagues was Peter Kwong, a structural biologist at Columbia University.
Yes, one that would take on even more snakes. This is so cool. The team agreed it was worth a try. First, they added a small synthetic molecule, one that had already been shown to work against some venoms. Here's Jacob again.
The team also went back to Tim's blood and found a second broad-acting antibody.
This cocktail of three components offered mice complete protection against 13 species and partial protection against six more, representing a set of genetically diverse venomous snakes from Asia, Africa, Australia, North America, and more.
There are other antivenoms that can neutralize a broad set of snakes, but this is the first one to do it using this approach.
Well, eventually human trials, which Jacob hopes are a couple years out. But before that, the team's planning to test their new cocktail in dogs that have been bit by venomous snakes in Australia.
So this is a first step. But others in the field say it's an important one.
This is David Williams. He evaluates antivenoms for the World Health Organization. He cautions that further developing this cocktail into a truly universal antivenom will inevitably have its challenges. Like right now, the recipe doesn't work on any vipers, which are a large portion of the venomous snakes that are out there. Wow.
And another researcher I talked to, Stuart Ainsworth, he's a molecular biologist at the University of Liverpool who studies snake bites, antivenoms, and antibodies. He told me that now we know this cocktail works in mice, he's eager to see how it'll work in people given that venoms are complex chemical mixes.
He became director of herpetology at Centivax, that biotech company. Wow. When he heard that his antibodies had helped create this new anti-venom cocktail, he says he was happy.
I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't believe it. I'm doing something for humanity and getting back to science.
He's retired from the snake bite life for multiple reasons. But Tim told me he sometimes still misses it.
Yeah. Mostly in terms of just knowing where it could take his mind.
To know you can beat that and keep her calm and keep her cool is a wonderful thing.
Nor should you, Regina. No one suggests you take the princess bride approach to snake venoms.
For sure, Gina. Thanks for having me.
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