Man injects snake venom for 18 years. His blood may help create antivenom

US' Tim Friede endured 200 venomous snake bites over 18 years to build immunity-now, antibodies in his blood may help scientists develop a universal snake antivenom

A man from US' Wisconsin may have just brought the world one step closer to a universal antivenom and he did it by letting some of the world’s deadliest snakes bite him. Repeatedly.

 

In a two-and-a-half-minute video, Tim Friede, 57, walks into a room, pulls a black mamba, one of the world’s deadliest snakes, from a crate and lets it bite his left arm. Then, moments later, he allows a taipan from Papua New Guinea to bite his right arm. Calmly bleeding, he turns to the camera and says, “Thanks for watching,” before walking out.

 

For nearly two decades, Friede has taken extreme risks. He injected himself with more than 650 carefully calculated doses of venom from 16 different deadly snake species. He’s been bitten about 200 times, sometimes by two snakes at once — all in the name of science and survival, reported The New York Times.

 

   

Now, scientists say his blood holds antibodies capable of neutralising venom from multiple snake species — a major breakthrough published on Friday in the journal Cell.

   

“I’m really proud that I can do something in life for humanity, to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away, that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably,” said Friede, who lives in the small city of Two Rivers, Wisconsin — not exactly a hotspot for venomous snakes.

   

Globally, snake bites kill around 120,000 people each year and disable another 400,000, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates. But experts say the real numbers are likely much higher. Over 600 venomous snake species inhabit the planet, and many communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America lack access to effective antivenom.

   

Research into better antivenoms has lagged behind the rising risk, which is growing due to climate change, deforestation, and human encroachment.

   

“This is a bigger problem than the first world realises,” said Jacob Glanville, founder and CEO of Centivax, and lead author of the new study. His company develops broad-spectrum vaccines and is now pushing to apply that concept to snakebites.

   

Glanville and his team discovered two powerful antibodies in Friede’s blood. When paired with a drug that blocks neurotoxins, these antibodies protected mice from venom from 19 different snake species across a wide geographic range.

   

That’s unprecedented. Traditional antivenoms usually only work against one or a few related species and often must be region-specific.

   

“The principles of this study can definitely be applied to other snakes,” said Nicholas Casewell, a venom expert at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, who was not involved in the research.

   

Friede’s fascination with snakes began at age 5 with a harmless garter snake bite. But it wasn’t until adulthood — married with kids and working in construction — that he began experimenting seriously. Initially dabbling with scorpions, he switched to snakes in the early 2000s, eventually keeping 60 venomous snakes in his basement lab.

   

But his early methods were dangerously unscientific. In a reckless moment on September 12, 2001, grieving the death of a friend and shaken by the 9/11 attacks, he let two cobras bite him. He lost consciousness and fell into a coma, waking up four days later in a hospital.

   

That brush with death changed everything.

   

He became meticulous, building his resistance through precise venom injections and timed bites. “I’d work all day, come home, play with the kids and the family, and go downstairs and do my stuff all night long, wake up and do it again,” he said.

   

There were still setbacks — allergic reactions, hives, blackouts — but Friede never gave up. Though he has no formal scientific degree, he refers to himself as a “nondegree scientist.” As he puts it, “There’s no college in the world that can teach you how to do it.”

   

For years, scientists collected samples of his blood, but nothing came of the research. By 2017, Friede was on the verge of quitting — until he connected with Dr Glanville.

   

Dr Glanville, who grew up in a Maya village in Guatemala, was already working on broadly neutralising antibodies for viruses. When he heard about Friede’s unusual self-experimentation, he reached out. “I’ve been waiting for this call for a long time,” Friede told him.

   

In partnership with Peter Kwong, a vaccine researcher at Columbia University, Glanville isolated antibodies from Friede’s blood and developed a new cocktail of treatments. The results were promising: one antibody protected mice from six snake species, and adding a second antibody and the molecule varespladib expanded that protection to 13 species, with partial protection against six more.

   

The variety of toxins in snake venom makes treatment especially tricky. Neurotoxins from cobras and mambas can paralyse the nervous system, while vipers destroy tissue and cause victims to bleed to death. Even venom from the same species can vary by region, age, diet, and season.

   

Modern antivenom hasn’t changed much in 130 years — it's still made by injecting venom into animals like horses or camels and harvesting the resulting antibodies. These treatments are usually species-specific and can cause dangerous allergic reactions.

   

Researchers are now aiming for safer and more effective alternatives: cocktails of monoclonal antibodies and small molecule drugs that neutralise multiple venom types without triggering immune reactions.

   

The next step is testing the treatment in real-world scenarios — starting with dogs bitten by snakes in Australia. Researchers also hope to find an additional antibody, possibly from Friede’s blood, to achieve full protection against all 19 species tested.

   

As for Friede, his last venomous bite came in November 2018, from a water cobra. By then, his wife and children had left. “Well, that’s it, enough is enough,” he remembered thinking.

   

He says he still misses the snakes, but not the pain. “I’ll probably get back into it in the future,” he said. “But for right now, I’m happy where things are at.”