Snakes are very useful. 'Leave the poor reptile alone.' | Commentary


Riley Davis
Sun, November 21, 2021

Among my friends and family, I’m known as the weird snake lover.

Because of that, every few weeks or so I’ll get a text with a grainy photo of a snake in a yard or by a local creek and some version of the message “let live or kill??” Nine times out of 10 it’s a harmless species of snake. But every single time, venomous or no, I’ll tell my friends to leave the poor reptile alone.

This isn’t borne out of my love for snakes, per se, even though I am definitely a fan (and because the most snake bites occur when humans try to move them). It’s because we understand so very little about a species that’s been feared and maligned for years. And as research continues and technologies evolve, one thing is becoming clear—snakes are potentially very useful in drug development, particularly venomous snakes.


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That realization has never been truer than this year. Just recently the University of Arizona published a study identifying a key molecular mechanism responsible for COVID-19 mortality: an enzyme related to the toxins found in rattlesnake venom. Now, researchers are exploring whether there are ways to engineer the enzyme to treat long-haul COVID.

The eastern indigo snake is a large nonvenomous snake native to the eastern United States.

Research on snakes has historically been slow and fragmented, and for understandable reasons. Snake encounters used to be fairly rare, especially in developed countries, and many venomous species are elusive. But as climate change shifts environments and human settlements grow, snake encounters have been on the rise in some parts of the world.

The good news is that as technological advances continue and databases grow in the genomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics fields, our understanding of how venoms can lead to new medicines has started to flourish, and not just as treatments for COVID. One of the first blood pressure drugs approved for clinical use came from studying the venom of a pit viper. The blood glucose drug Byetta was created using the saliva of the Gila monster, a venomous lizard found in North America. The antiplatelet drug Aggrastat was derived from a molecule found in the saw-scaled viper.

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And we might even have a universal antivenom in as little as five years. That’s according to researchers at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s Centre for Snakebite Research and Interventions who are studying how to use camels to produce more stable antivenom that doesn’t require cold chain storage. This is huge news, especially for people in rural parts of the world, because antivenom is currently prohibitively expensive and hard to transport.

All of this is to say that while I love snakes, this isn’t a love letter to them, or a reprimand to anyone I see on Facebook asking if they should kill the snake in their yard. It’s a call to pause and consider the future the next time you stumble across a snake—or other creepy crawly species—and decide you should unalive it. If at all possible, don’t. The vast majority of snake species are harmless. And even if you do encounter the venomous kind (or, as I like to call them, a spicy nope rope), your best bet is to live and let live. Because there’s a future not too far from now where that scaly creature could very well save someone’s life.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Commentary: Medical research, like on COVID-19, benefits from snakes