News Excerpt:

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru have developed a synthetic human antibody that can neutralize a potent neurotoxin produced by the Elapidae family of highly venomous snakes, which includes the cobra, king cobra, krait and black mamba.

Key takeaways of the study:

• Snake Bites cause thousands of deaths every year, especially in India and sub-Saharan Africa. 
• The current strategy for developing anti-venom involves injecting snake venom into equines like horses, ponies and mules and collecting antibodies from their blood.
• The antibody developed by the team targets a conserved region found in the core of a major toxin called the elapid venom's three-finger toxin (3FTx). 
• Although different species of elapids produce different 3FTxs, a handful of regions in the protein are similar. 
• They designed a large library of artificial antibodies from humans, which were displayed on yeast cell surfaces. 
• They then tested the antibodies’ ability to bind to 3FTxs from various elapid snakes worldwide.
• After repeated screening, they narrowed down their choice to one antibody that could bind strongly to various 3FTxs. 
• Among the 149 variants of 3FTxs in public repositories, this antibody could bind with 99.