AI-Designed Antivenoms: New Proteins to Block Deadly Snake Toxins

Summary

Welcome to Plenty of Room! If you get value out of this newsletter, don’t forget to share with your friends and colleagues: sharing is caring after all! Today I check out an exciting paper using AI protein design to solve a very real problem: snakebites. Plenty of Room is your guide to the cutting-edge news related to molecular machines. Already subscribed? Share with a friend that might find this interesting! It really helps. Antivenoms with AI-designed proteinsAI-designed proteins can block toxins contained in the venom of cobras and other snakes. Image credit: Nature. So, I love snakes: I think they are the coolest animals out there. That being said, snakebites are a devastating public health threat in areas like sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America. Snakebite envenoming is classified as a highest-priority neglected tropical disease by the WHO, and each year 2 million people suffer from snakebite envenomation, leading to over 100,000 deaths and countless cases of lifelong disabilities. Despite this, very little resources are dedicated to improve the current antivenom treatments. Traditional antivenoms are produced in a similar way to the first vaccines. An animal, often an horse or a sheep, is inoculated with the venom to stimulate antibody production. At that point, the animal’s plasma is extracted and purified. This process has several drawbacks: It’s expensive, it’s slow (in horses it takes up to a year!) and it’s difficult Can cause a lot of side effects It’s not very effective for toxins that have little capacity to elicit an immune response These issues make antivenoms unreliable and inaccessible, especially in the low-resource settings where snakebites are more common. An AI-Powered Solution to Antivenom Design Okay, it’s clear that there is an unmet need for new and better antivenoms. The authors of today’s paper propose a solution, using AI-driven protein design. In particular, they focused their computational efforts on 2 families of toxins,...