[HN Gopher] Will protein design tools solve the snake antivenom ...
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Will protein design tools solve the snake antivenom shortage?
Author : sebg
Score : 54 points
Date : 2025-05-08 12:05 UTC (10 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.owlposting.com)
| karmakaze wrote:
| Or one man with more than 200 bites and more than 700 injections
| of venom he prepared from some of the world's deadliest
| snakes[0].
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5d0l7el36o
| worthless-trash wrote:
| A man called "Ram Chandra" used to come to my school in the
| 80-90's and educate us on the danger of snakes (he has since
| passed away).
|
| There is a little talk of it here
| https://www.mackayandwhitsundaylife.com/article/remembering-...
|
| I had seen him get bitten by a bunch of different snakes during
| his time demonstrating dangerous animals to my school on
| different occasions, he was always very kind and educational.
|
| I believe he had was also involved in milking snakes and making
| antivenom, but the specifics evade me.
|
| I believe he went to many different schools educating the small
| townships of the Australian outback (Imagine more than 20 less
| than 30) and always had time to answer my stupid questions as a
| child.
|
| This part of my local culture will be missed.
| thorin wrote:
| It doesn't mention if he died from snake bites... Sounds like
| an interesting guy!
| stuckkeys wrote:
| "Milking snakes..." tempted to put that on gpt and see what
| that looks like.
| JTbane wrote:
| Anyone else find it hilarious that snake bites follow the logic
| of "expose yourself to just a little deadly poison to gain
| immunity"?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Why? It's immunologically sensible : let the immune system
| train antibodies on a non lethal amount of novel protein
| antigen, like traditional vaccines, and (i bet to your point)
| in stark contrast with "homeopathy" in some definitions.
| zamalek wrote:
| Homeopathy is way more extreme, for what it's worth. The
| idea is to keep diluting the thing until it's basically
| chemically absent, with only the "nature" or the juju or
| whatever it is.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Relevant Mitchell & Webb comedy sketch, title translated
| for Americans as "Homepathic ER".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqWieBlI1bA
| abhishaike wrote:
| I mention this in the article :)
| gilleain wrote:
| Related : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708841
| User23 wrote:
| The shortage is already rather artificial. A snakebite treatment
| that costs $150k in the USA is just a few hundred dollars in
| Mexico.
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| How is that possible?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Is your second sentence supposed to be evidence of your first?
|
| I'm no fan of a system that prices things differently based on
| how much the dying person (or their insurance) is likely to be
| able to pay, but in such a system you've got prices dictated by
| demand... can you really reason your way from prices back to
| notions of authentic supply?
| fallingknife wrote:
| You have to deregulate the supply. Right now you have to be
| specifically approved to manufacture a drug. This causes
| monopolies / oligopolies even in non-patented medications. It
| should be changed to a system where any company who wants can
| manufacture any drug as long as it meets purity and dosage
| accuracy standards.
| os2warpman wrote:
| >You have to deregulate the supply.
|
| We already had that.
|
| It was a disaster.
|
| For centuries. No. Millennia.
|
| Until enough people died to make regulation palatable.
|
| Going back to that would be like going back to bloodletting
| to balance the four humors.
|
| "Oh but baby we've changed" --some random private equity
| sociopath
|
| "We've got computers now man that changes things, we'll
| build an ai-enabled pharma tech stack on the blockchain"
| --some techbro
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >For centuries. No. Millennia.
|
| We might have had other, confounding factors during that
| time period. And while he did mention "deregulation", he
| also indicated that he only wanted partial
| deregulation... that there would still be some demand for
| purity/dosage.
|
| When people talk about deregulation, there is this idea
| that regulations already exist. If you're talking about
| periods from anitquity where no regulations existed at
| all, this isn't comparable to a period of deregulation
| where presumably everyone knows what the regulations were
| trying to accomplish and agree on those and other basic
| scientific principles. We also had no FAA 10,000 years
| ago, and no one died in plane crashes then, right? That
| proves how awesome regulation is in the same way your
| example proves how awful it is. How can these two
| arguments reach entirely difference conclusions, do you
| think?
|
| >"Oh but baby we've changed" --some random private equity
| sociopath
|
| Or, just possibly, people come to realize over time that
| their initial knee-jerk reactions went too far, and cause
| measurable harm that they want to reduce. Unfettered
| capitalism does get a few things right... it can go from
| supply shortages to excess quickly. Let it work.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yes, how could I forget all those people who died from
| correctly dosed and uncontaminated medications.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I see, I had assumed that the same party was supplying both
| sides of the border.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Does it actually cost $150k, or is that just the sticker price?
| What does United Healthcare pay for a dose? That's the actual
| price.
|
| Fake price tags are a huge issue in health care policy.
| yorwba wrote:
| There's two kinds of shortage here: the availability _in
| principle_ of an antivenom for a specific snake venom and the
| availability _in practice_ of a dose of antivenom to treat a
| specific snake bite.
|
| Rich people paying whatever it takes to avoid dying provide a
| captive market for the first case (at least as far as snakes
| that rich people often get bitten by are concerned), and
| protein design tools also aim at this kind of shortage.
|
| But as the article points out, most people getting bitten by
| snakes are affected by the second kind of shortage, because
| they're too poor to afford several hundred dollars. To address
| this, the newly-designed antivenom also needs to be cheap
| enough to manufacture that people actually buy it in large
| enough volumes that it justifies the initial R&D investment for
| the manufacturer.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| It is a bit more complicated than that [0]. Most of those costs
| are not attributable to the antivenom but to other overheads
| that are part of the process, including litigation costs. The
| FDA fees per vial alone are a few hundred dollars, even higher
| than the clinical trial costs.
|
| [0]
| https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)00781-0/fulltex...
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I recently watched this YouTube documentary about a Borneo tribe,
| barely clinging onto their traditional ways/knowledge (displaced
| by the logging industry) who used a plant as a supposedly
| universal snake bite remedy ... I wonder if there was ever a
| scientific study of how effective it actually is?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiQBTesZUJQ
| kyleblarson wrote:
| I live in an area with tons of rattlesnakes and deal with at
| least 6-10 per year on my property. They generally just want to
| be left alone which I usually oblige unless they are near the
| house or shop. I heard an old timer say that the majority of
| snake bite victims in our area are young males and the most
| common pre-bite words are "hold my beer, watch this."
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Recent Derek Lowe article on antivenom:
| https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/whole-lotta-snakin...
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