A recent Nature News story explains that many pharma companies have stopped producing antivenom and only five of the 35 companies or governments who make antivenom make products for sub-Saharan Africa.
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Yet the region has done well in terms of antivenom.
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In a second attempt to find the correct antivenom, the medical center reached out to officials with the Miami-Dade County Venom Response Program in Florida, which later sent 20 vials of a different antivenom.
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Venomyx Therapeutics: Venomyx is creating a universal recombinant antivenom for snakebite.
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Trilobites Some scientists hope genomic technologies will lead to improved antivenom.
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Nowadays, rather than producing a single antivenom for each type of snake, the animals employed to make the stuff are injected with several different toxins, in the hope of creating an antivenom effective against them all.
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Producing antivenom in this way can get messy, not to mention dangerous.
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An antivenom company he started in 2013, called VenomAB, folded last year.
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Megan Saffer of SAVP, in Johannesburg, the firm responsible for the SAIMR Echis antivenom, says that an effort is now under way to re-label this antivenom so that it will be used only in regions where it is truly effective.
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The hospital, a few hours drive away, didn't have any antivenom in their stocks.
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This antivenom is listed as effective against a species called Echis carinatus (pictured overleaf).
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Antivenom shortages are a problem the world over — it's not just about FAV-Afrique.
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Currently, antivenom is the only effective medicine, provided a bite victim can get treated in time.
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They're hoping it will serve as a roadmap to bring antivenom production into the 21st century.
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Adopting a new antivenom in Chad caused fatality rates from bites to go from 2.3% to 15%.
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A few years ago, the only FDA-approved coral snake antivenom in the United States got discontinued.
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Sutcliffe said her husband needed 26 doses of antivenom, where a normal patient gets two to four.
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Wellcome estimate that one vial of antivenom costs $160, and a full course usually requires multiple vials.
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And right now there's a global shortage of the only thing that can save a bite victim: antivenom.
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And drones were used for humanitarian missions, helping to move blood across Rwanda and antivenom in rural Australia.
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At the end of June 2016, the last remaining supplies of an important, safe, and effective antivenom expired.
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Antivenom inspires your body to produce antibodies, warrior cells that will prevent venom from spreading through your body.
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Yet producers are leaving the antivenom market in Africa, stocks are dwindling, and few authorities seem to care.
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But the distribution of snakes is erratic, and epidemiological data is anemic, mooting targeted single-snake antivenom dissemination.
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Even major antivenom producers often have to (or embrace the excuse to) forego proper clinical tests before rollout.
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The resulting antivenom contains many nonhuman antibodies irrelevant to venom, some of which can create harmful immune responses.
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A vial of antivenom costs about $2,000, and treatment of one bite can require 25 vials or more.
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For close to 100 years, antivenom production has been a laborious process of snake-milking and horse blood harvesting.
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The park has a venom program, and is looking for more arachnids to milk in order to produce antivenom.
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And, after an hour and a half wait, Meg's doctor returned with antivenom, the usual treatment for venomous snakebites.
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Some scientists think genomic technologies could be used to synthesize antivenom, and eventually treat victims more cheaply and effectively.
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Most venomous snakebites happen in parts of the world that aren't high income, meaning that making antivenom isn't particularly profitable.
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After visiting four clinics, and receiving only painkillers because there was no antivenom, Zamo and her mother reached Litschka-Koen.
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Last September, Doctors Without Borders put out a press release about Fav-Afrique, the most effective polyvalent antivenom in Africa.
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Antivenom can cost thousands of dollars per vial in the United States, according to research from the University of Arizona.
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And in the end, the antivenom produced is not always effective in boosting the immune system of a snakebite victim.
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Worldwide, poor access to affordable antivenom puts the snakebite death toll near 100,000 annually, with millions more maimed or crippled.
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Today's IndieBio SF companies are developing everything from animal health monitors, and clinical trial matching platforms, to antivenom for snake bites.
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They also noted these snakes are rarely used to develop essential antivenom since laboratories keep captive colonies to create the medicine.
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The antivenom approach does, though, depend on the venom injected into a victim being among those used to make the treatment.
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"As long as [antivenom] is user fee driven, people will only have access to low-cost, low-quality products," says Potet.
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Then she was taken to a health clinic, but workers did not have the antivenom medicine she needed, her family said.
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Sutcliffe called 911 and helped her husband into their car as she tried to find a local hospital with rattlesnake antivenom available.
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So in the late 2000s, when companies popped up offering antivenom at far cheaper rates, ministries of health jumped at the opportunity.
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Over the past quarter-century, sub-Saharan Africa's antivenom stocks dropped from 22012,290 reliable doses to about 22020,000 less reliable doses today.
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And although an antivenom exists, the antidote is difficult to come by where it's needed most in parts of southern and eastern Africa.
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Innovations Scientists are also pursuing ambitious attempts to change the basis for antivenom production that has remained the same since the 19th century.
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Puzzled, medical center officials reached out to the Toledo Zoo in Ohio in hopes officials would provide an antivenom that would cure the man.
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South Africa is the only sub-Saharan African country to produce antivenom, but Habib notes that Nigeria has long pursued its own development strategy.
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The venom had traveled halfway to his heart by the time he arrived at the hospital, so doctors decided to treat him with antivenom.
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They hope it will bring antivenom production into the 21st Century and ultimately save thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives each year.
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And while an antivenom exists, it involves a practically medieval method of snake milking and horse blood harvesting that is error prone and inefficient.
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This discovery explains why tiger snake antivenom is so useful in treatments against bites from other Australian snakes which affect blood in the same way.
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Those deliveries of supplies such as blood products, medicines, and snake antivenom will go to more than 1,000 hospitals and clinics serving 10 million people.
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MICHIGAN MAN HOSPITALIZED FOR RARE COBRA BITE; OFFICIALS SCRAMBLE TO FIND ANTIVENOM "The car is a loss, but cars can be replaced - my boys can't."
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They believe this will deliver antivenom that is cheaper and safer than horse-based serum, which is associated with side effects such as anaphylactic shock.
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Advances in biotechnology make the concept realistic, says lead researcher Andreas Hougaard Laustsen, and he expects human-based antivenom will eventually become the standard treatment.
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Calmette's method still dominates antivenom production today—a practically medieval process of snake milking and horse blood harvesting that is laborious, expensive, and error-prone.
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Their portable solution will bring antivenom into the 21st century and make treatment safe, effective, and available to the 5.5 million victims of snakebite per year.
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"No other antivenom in the world is so spectacularly effective against such a wide range of snakes this way and now we know why," explained Fry.
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Barczy told Fox News on Tuesday afternoon no other information is currently available, declining to comment on whether the most recent antivenom appeared to be successful.
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She founded the Antivenom Swazi Trust Foundation, which raises money to buy serum and leads symposiums on treatment for local doctors low on relevant skill sets.
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Inaccessibility and bad experiences, combined with preexisting mistrust of healthcare systems, mean that only ten to 20 percent of snakebite victims seek and use antivenom treatments.
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"Latin America has a long-standing tradition of providing its own antivenom," said Boyer, adding that its governments subsidize the treatment, evading supply and demand traps.
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Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark are using synthetic biology to produce human-based antivenom, by mixing venom with "recombinant" antibodies derived from human cells.
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The availability of such resources is helping a US antivenom startup called Venomyx stay on track with its own experiments despite difficulties in securing VC funding.
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It's because the Australian Reptile Park is the only place in the country that milks funnel web spiders of their venom, which is used to make antivenom.
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The publicity Doctors Without Borders provided has given antivenom activists a shot in the arm by demonstrating the power and vectors of an effective snakebite PR campaign.
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The achievement not only shows scientists how to use the same methods to sequence other venomous snake species, it also unlocks the door to modernizing antivenom production.
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Tiger snake antivenom has an extraordinary level of "cross reactivity" against other snake species, meaning it can neutralize the lethal effects of venomous bites in many other cases.
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His wife Jennifer Sutcliffe told local news station KIIITV that doctors said he might not survive, but he is now in recovery, thanks to 26 vials of antivenom.
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This may explain why the man had to receive so much antivenom at the hospital — 26 doses, Sutcliffe told KIII, which is far more than most patients need.
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When they receive an order, they grab the requested product from a large storeroom stocked with everything from yellow fever vaccine to oxytocin, from blood platelets to antivenom.
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Swish them around with vats of venom protein, and see which ones bind the best: These are the antibodies that are likely to work well in an antivenom.
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Eventually, even with 26 doses of antivenom in his body (the average treatment is between two and four), the doctors had to put him in a medically induced coma.
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The creation of nationwide buying programs and better regulations on antivenom quality, combined with advances in epidemiological knowledge and production techniques, could produce viable, affordable antivenoms, even for remote usage.
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When he returned to France, he injected Indian cobra venom into rabbits in small doses and discovered that the animals produced a serum with a protective effect: the first antivenom.
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A 40-year-old man is recovering in the hospital after receiving more than 453 doses of antivenom to save him from a bite from the severed head of a rattlesnake.
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While the zoo sent eight vials of a generic antivenom, it "had little effect and the patient's condition continued to worsen," Jason Barczy, communications manager for the DMC, told the paper.
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RARE TWO-HEADED SNAKE DISCOVERED IN BACKYARD "A normal person who is going to get bit is going to get two to four doses of antivenom," Sutcliffe told the news station.
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Jeremy came out of his coma on May 31, after receiving a total of 26 doses of antivenom, a massive amount considering snake bites typically require two to four doses, Sutcliffe says.
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MSF had hoped to convince the pharmaceutical company to accelerate the transfer of their technology to another company and to continue producing antivenom in the interim period, but that still hasn't happened.
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Even if they find someone else willing to produce the treatment, Potet says it'll take a couple of years for a new company to get production going and to get antivenom distributed.
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Up until recently, the only way to make antivenom was to milk a snake of its venom, inject that venom into a horse, and then harvest the antibodies that the horse produced.
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In a statement emailed by a representative of Sanofi, the company explained that they ceased production of FAV-Afrique after lower cost products led to a "steep drop in orders" for their antivenom.
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RATTLESNAKE TERRIFIES NORTH CAROLINA BOATERS AS IT SWIMS ACROSS LAKE, ATTEMPTS TO SLITHER ABOARD The man received the antivenom, according to the Detroit Free Press, though his condition remains unclear at this time.
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Several Latin American governments make antivenom available free, and the government of Burkina Faso recently introduced a subsidy that could cut the cost of treatment by more than $100, according to some studies.
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The basic method is to inject small doses of venom into large animals such as horses and then collect the resultant antibodies from their blood, before distilling them into antivenom for human use.
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Even if the people who need it can afford it -- most snakebite victims live in rural Asia and Africa -- the world has less than half of the antivenom stock it needs, according to Wellcome.
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Myrick was taken to a local hospital, where the staff monitored the swelling of her foot; when she eventually had swelling that extended to her hipbone, they administered antivenom (in addition to morphine and Benadryl).
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With this catalog of genes specific to venom production, they hope scientists can now begin to use recombinant protein technologies to generate antivenom effective against the venom of the Indian cobra and closely related species.
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We got in touch with Steve at the University of Copenhagen where he's working with a team in developing a new antivenom that will help save thousands of lives, to discuss a possible new career move.
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Alberto Alape-Girón, the head of Instituto Clodomiro Picado, in Costa Rica, where EchiTab-Plus-ICP is made, noted that his team was responding to the situation by "developing a new antivenom of wider neutralisation efficacy".
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As Boyer explains it, the solution isn't going to come from a place like the US, where her research shows a 1,000-fold markup between the cost to make antivenom and the cost a patient pays.
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According to Professors Leslie Boyer and David Warrell, antivenom experts at the Universities of Arizona and Oxford, respectively, other antivenoms already provide similar coverage, and producers are also developing economically and medically viable Fav-Afrique replacements.
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Not every African nation can have its own antivenom industry—only South Africa does—but many believe that outreach programs would restore faith in serums (which most will still use if they're cheap and proven effective).
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That could apply to something like a snakebite, a rare incident requiring a one-time refrigerated antivenom treatment, or even a rural burst of plague, the worst forms of which require quick diagnosis and treatment to control.
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In response to studies about the relative ineffectiveness of the antivenom in question when used on bites from African species of the snake, BSaV said that the inclusion of Asian venom is listed in the product inserts or liner notes.
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But producing antivenom is not an area that pharmaceutical companies have traditionally been keen to invest in, Clevers said Campaigners often describe snakebites as a hidden health crisis, with snakebites killing more people than prostrate cancer and cholera worldwide, Cammack said.
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Antivenom production, which was pioneered in the 19th century by Albert Calmette, a student of Louis Pasteur, involves extracting venom from snakes and injecting it into animals, such as horses, that can, thanks to their size, survive large doses of the stuff.
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To create an antivenom, genetic information and organoid technology could be used to make the specific venom components that cause the most harm -- and from them produce monoclonal antibodies, which mimic the body's immune system, to fight the venom, a method already used in immunotherapy treatments for cancer and other diseases.
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