[kellyhound]

A Gila monster that bit its owner, 34-year-old Christopher Ward, in Lakewood on Feb. 12, leading to his death, was returned to Colorado this week and sent to a lab in Greeley on Thursday for testing on the reptile's venom.

"That's a very unusual consequence of a Gila monster bite," said Stephen Mackessy, a biology professor at the University of Northern Colorado.

Mackessy will lead efforts to extract venom from the reptile, then study the venom to see if it offers any clues as to why the 34-year-old owner died.

"We'll see if the venom has anything different in it from a typical Gila monster's venom that might explain some of the effects and why this man had such severe compromise of his life functions so rapidly," said Mackessy.

According to a Lakewood animal control report, officers were called to a home on South Holland Street on Feb. 12 just before midnight after a woman called to report her boyfriend had been bitten by one of his two Gila monsters and was having a reaction.

The woman said the reptile had bitten her boyfriend on the hand and "he immediately began exhibiting symptoms, vomiting several times and eventually passing out and ceasing to breathe." He was hospitalized but died four days later.

The juvenile Gila monster named "Winston" was initially transported to a reptile facility in South Dakota, but was brought to the Greeley lab Thursday so its venom could be extracted and studied.

As the lizard was removed from the box it was transported in, Mackessy said it appeared to be "in really good condition." The extraction of venom took place Friday, according to Mackessy.

Mackessy said Gila monster bites happen often, but deaths resulting from them do not. The last reported death from a Gila monster bite was in 1930.

Mackessy said Gila monsters produce toxins that are made out of proteins, which is what will be extracted, then studied.

He said the process of analyzing the venom should take one to two weeks.

The Jefferson County Coroner's Office initially reported doing an autopsy on the bite victim but personnel in the office said the precise cause of death would not be known until toxicology testing was completed.

While Mackessy said there are many questions about what led to the man's death, he said "it certainly sounds like there was some aspect of allergic reaction. This was a horrible situation."

The biology professor went on to say people should not use this rare case to malign or kill Gila monsters or rattlesnakes.

"They're not out there waiting for humans to bite them. They're out there as part of various ecosystems and they're an important component and the Gila monster has their place too," he said.

Gila (pronounced hee-la) monsters are half-meter-long (about 20 inches) lizards native to the US's Southwest and Mexican state of Sonora. With a distinctive bumpy texture, blotchy black-and-orange skin, and a personality that is more mouse than monster, the lizard is prized among reptile collectors.

As destructive as the Gila monster's venom is, some of its contents have inspired the development of novel pharmaceuticals.

A peptide called exendin-4 activates a class of receptor found on cells in the brain and pancreas that enhances insulin secretion.

In the hands of biochemists, exendin-4 was modified into semaglutide; a drug now sold as a diabetes drug-turned weight-loss therapy under brands like Wegovy and Ozempic.

[kellyhound]

Researchers have discovered a potent antibody that can neutralize a key type of neurotoxin produced by four different deadly snake species from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa—a step toward an antivenom that could be used on any of the 200 or so dangerous venomous snakes throughout the world.

“We are wiping out a major subclass of neurotoxins here,” says Nicholas Casewell, a toxinologist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and co-author on a paper describing the antibody published today in Science Translational Medicine. “I think this is a really huge step in terms of what can be achieved by a single antibody.”

Snake venoms are a mix of dozens or even hundreds of compounds that target nerve cells, blood clotting, or tissues, killing an estimated 81,000 to 138,000 people around the globe annually and disabling hundreds of thousands more.

The standard treatment is antivenoms, a cocktail of antibodies harvested from horses or sheep injected with nonlethal doses of the venom. Although these drugs save lives, “antivenoms suffer from numerous problems,” says Kartik Sunagar, head of the evolutionary venomics lab at the Indian Institute of Science and a lead author on the paper.

For one thing, snake venoms vary a lot between species, meaning treatment depends on which species has bitten you—which is not always known. Venoms can vary even within species; Sunagar’s research group discovered that an antivenom used after the bite of the monocellate cobra (Naja kaouthia) is almost completely ineffective in some regions in India.

Many antivenoms are made to work against several snakes from the same region, which means they’re relatively weak against one another. One such cocktail widely used in Africa fails to save roughly one in seven people bitten by the black mamba (Dendroaspis polylepis), for example. People have died despite receiving dozens of vials of the drug.

Also, because these drugs are made from animal proteins, they can cause adverse immune reactions, including life-threatening anaphylaxis.

That’s why doctors often wait until a snakebite patient develops symptoms before administering antivenom, even though “any snake bite is a race against time: The quicker you get antivenom, the better the clinical outcome,” says Andreas Laustsen-Kiel, a toxinologist at the Technical University of Denmark who was not involved in the work.

To address these issues, Sunagar partnered with Casewell and Joseph Jardine, an expert in protein engineering at Scripps Research, as a part of a Wellcome Trust–funded consortium.

Jardine’s team made lab-grown cells produce synthetic versions of a key ingredient of many snakes’ venom, known as long-chain three-finger alpha-neurotoxins (3FTx-L).

These toxins cause paralysis by shutting down nerve cells’ ability to respond to a key neurotransmitter. Then the group tested some 100 billion artificial human antibodies in the lab’s massive antibody library—a far bigger collection than the immune system of any animal exposed to venom could come up with—to find out which one best bound to the toxins.

“It’s really a needle in a very large haystack,” Jardine says. The researchers ended up with a couple dozen promising candidates.

These were sent to Casewell, whose team tested how well they protected human cells from the toxin. An antibody dubbed 95Mat5 had the best performance, and the team also found out why it worked so well: The antibody bound to alpha-bungarotoxin—the primary 3FTx-L in the venom of the Southeast Asian many-banded krait (Bungarus multicinctus)—at exactly same spot where the toxin binds ion channels on human nerve and muscle cells.

To find out whether 95Mat5 protects animals, Sunagar’s team injected groups of five mice with a normally lethal dose of alpha-bungarotoxin mixed with the antibody, a standard way to test antivenoms.

All of the mice survived. 95Mat5 also saved mice injected with the full venom from the same krait species, believed to contain at least four dozen different toxins—even when given 20 minutes after the venom.

The same was true for the venoms of monocellate cobras and black mambas. “If you had asked me 6 years ago, I would have said that you’d be out of your mind to think that you can neutralize a snake venom by targeting just one toxin,” Sunagar says.

The antibody did not protect mice from the venom of king cobras (Ophiophagus hannah)—a species found on the Indian subcontinent, in southern China, and in Southeast Asia—but it did delay their death.

The neutralization of the notorious big mamba venom in particular is “surprising,” says Laustsen-Kiel, who is also developing antibodies against snake venoms. “That really speaks to the fact that it’s a good antibody.”

95Mat5 could supplement existing antivenoms, which are not very effective against 3FTx-Ls, Casewell and Jardine say. And because the antibody is human, it’s less likely to cause unwanted side effects. But snakebite, which occurs primarily in low- and middle-income countries, is a neglected health problem, and it’s not clear who would fund the antibody’s further development and production.

“The next steps are probably more driven by economy, strategic decisions, and health care systems’ priorities than they are by science and technology,” Laustsen-Kiel says.

Jardine says the team is planning to follow the same discovery process with other classes of potent snake toxins.

Their distant hope is to create a cocktail of antibodies that neutralizes the venoms from every dangerous snake on the planet.

“You’d no longer have to stock hundreds of antivenoms,” Jardine says. “You could stock a single universal one.”

[mothmon]

I was always disappointed as a little kid when people told me there were real creatures that were called "gila monsters" and then I saw one and it wasn't a monster at all, much as I was disappointed when my brother said, "Let's go find salamanders" and it wasn't a tiny animal shaped like a man.

[BBKF]

It has beautiful coloring. It looks healthy and well taken care of. Perhaps an anaphylactic reaction?

[CatBatMan]

Two observations.

1) Apparently I was the last person on the planet to realize they are "heela" monsters, not "geela" monsters.

2) Using the phrase "needle in a haystack" to describe a difficult search is utterly fucking ridiculous. Has nobody ever heard of magnets? How about we say "looking for a verrrrrry specific needle in a massive pile of other needles?"

[CatBatMan]

Originally Posted by mothmon ↗

I was always disappointed as a little kid when people told me there were real creatures that were called "gila monsters" and then I saw one and it wasn't a monster at all, much as I was disappointed when my brother said, "Let's go find salamanders" and it wasn't a tiny animal shaped like a man.

I know how you feel. My first visit to Dick's was a crushing disappointment.