How to Use Viper Venom to Treat Cancer

Since December 2000, scientists have been investigating the use of viper venom in the treatment of cancer. A protein, contortrostatin, was isolated from the southern copperhead. Dr. Francis Markland of the University of Southern California found that contortrostatin worked in two ways to prevent the spread of cancer in mice: it inhibited cancer cells from latching onto other cells, which is how cancer spreads, and at the same time, contortrostatin also prevented new blood vessels from being formed, which is what feeds new cancer growths. While snake venom proteins are already in use as drugs for heart disease and stroke, cancer researchers have joined the fray, attempting to discover new treatments for cancer.

Things You'll Need

• Nothing: leave this to the experts

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Instructions

• 1

  Cobra venom has both neurotoxic and hemotoxic proteins.

  Study the venoms of the approximately 650 venomous snakes on the planet. As snake venoms are complex compounds of various proteins and enzymes, it may take a while to discover which might have potential for medicinal uses. Both neurotoxins (attacks nervous system) and hemotoxins (attacks circulatory system) have potential uses in medicine.

• 2

  Professional snake catchers provide wild snakes to serpentariums and labortories.

  Catch the venomous snakes and obtain their venom. Fortunately, there are many people from snake- getters to Ph.D. researchers who obtain snakes for a living. Dr. Zoltan Takacs, a snake researcher and professor at the University of Chicago, not only catches the world's venomous reptiles, but he also studies them in the lab in attempts to isolate beneficial proteins for the treatment of diseases.

• 3

  Isolate the proteins that produce the desired effect in heart disease and cancer treatments. Finding the proteins that might have a specific effect on a specific disease can take years of study. To streamline this effort, Dr. Takacs's team has created a "toxin library" so that many variants of venom proteins can be screened and tested.

• 4

  Once the protein is isolated, a synthetic version of the viper venom must be developed that will not be toxic to lab animals or patients. Dr. Markland, mentioned above, used genetic engineering to instruct bacteria to make the protein, as obtaining the protein from copperhead snake venom would be difficult and expensive. Now the protein produced by the engineered bacteria can provide the drug for medical research.

• 5

  Test the synthesized protein on animals such as lab mice. Clinical animal studies are a major step in drug development. The use of contortrostatin is currently being tested on animals. Markland and his team, studying mice with implanted breast cancer, discovered that contortrostatin prevented the cancer from spreading to the lungs of the mice by 90%.