Tim Friede: Man bitten by snakes hundreds of times helps create broad antivenom
Friede, a former truck mechanic with no formal scientific training, had been fascinated by snakes since childhood.
It’s not often that a major scientific paper leads one to a story like this. It was while reading a new Cell study on snake venom antibodies that the name of a “hyperimmune donor” in the acknowledgments caught my eye.
Behind that clinical language lies the story of Tim Friede, a self-taught snake enthusiast from Wisconsin whose obsession might one day unlock a medical innovation for snakebite victims across India and the world.
Snakebites kill up to 140,000 people each year, and among countries, India bears the highest toll. Treatment has changed little since the 1890s, when Albert Calmette first used horse serum to neutralise cobra venom in colonial India.
Antivenoms today are still based on animal-derived polyclonal antibodies, which often cause allergic reactions, don’t work against all species, require cold-chain storage, and depend on correct species identification. For patients in remote villages who travel hours to reach a hospital, these limitations can be fatal.
This is where our hyperimmune donor comes in. Friede, a former truck mechanic with no formal scientific training, had been fascinated by snakes since childhood. In 2001, he decided to take that interest to the extreme. After methodically working up to it, he let himself be bitten by a venomous snake for the first time. “They want to kill me,” he told NPR. “And I want to survive.”
Friede’s first two cobra bites landed him in a coma for four days. Undeterred, he went on to receive 202 snakebites from some of the world’s deadliest species and injected himself with 654 additional doses of venom. Over time, his blood became an archive of immune responses to snake-derived neurotoxins from around the world.
That’s where Jacob Glanville, a computational immunologist and CEO of the biotech firm Centivax, enters the story. Glanville had been looking for a universal target across multiple snake species. Instead of relying on animals like horses, he wanted to find potent human antibodies that could be mass-produced. When he heard about Friede, he knew he had found an unprecedented immune system. (The researchers are quick to emphasise that no one should follow Friede’s path. He stopped self-immunising in 2018).
In the Cell study, Glanville’s team isolated two extraordinarily broad and potent antibodies from Friede’s blood. These antibodies targeted conserved regions in long- and short-chain neurotoxins, which are proteins shared across dozens of deadly snakes. Combined with a small molecule called varespladib, which inhibits a third venom component, they created a three-part cocktail. It protected mice from lethal doses of venom from 13 snake species and extended survival in six more. Among the snakes tested were many that plague the Indian subcontinent, including the common krait and Indian cobra.
Anirban Mahapatra is a scientist and author, most recently of the popular science book ‘When the Drugs Don’t Work: The Hidden Pandemic That Could End Medicine’. The views expressed are personal.
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