The bite of a poisonous snake, scorpion or other venomous creature could very well kill you, but it also might be able to heal certain medical conditions like cancer, diabetes and heart failure.
That’s the idea behind VenomKB, short for Venom Knowledge Base, the first online database that aims to catalog all the known animal toxins and their physiological effects on humans. Its creators at Columbia University hope the searchable directory will spur the development of new drugs made with compounds found in animal venom.
The publicly available database summarizes the results of thousands of published medical studies describing the use of venom toxins as painkillers or as treatments for diseases. To create the database, assistant professor of biomedical informatics Nicholas Tatonetti and graduate student Joseph Romano first searched through 22 million medical research papers for references to therapeutic uses of venom. That turned up a list of 5,117 venom-related studies. Using computer algorithms, they then summarized the findings and found nearly 43,000 unique mentions of venoms having a specific effect on the body. The process behind creating VenomKB is described in the journal Scientific Data.
"With this list we can take stock of what we know about venoms and their therapeutic effects," said Tatonetti in a statement. "The questions now is: How can we use this information with other databases to discover new compounds and therapies?"
Found in more than 173,000 species, venom is secreted for either defensive or offensive purposes. Although venom has evolved over time to cause harm, scientists are finding that certain toxins have beneficial uses in medicine—with some dating back thousands of years.
Venom’s healing powers are paradoxically linked to their ability to quickly and efficiently kill intruders and prey in the wild. Venom is actually a deadly cocktail of several substances – including proteins, peptides and sugars – that acts on different targets in the body, controlling how cells behave. Different mixtures of these substances account for how different venoms act on the body. For example, some venoms cause paralysis while others trigger blood clotting or eat away at tissues and muscle.
Because venom targets molecules that are often involved in disease, researchers believe they can harness these properties for use in drugs by mimicking or altering how these toxins act on specific human cells.
Modern medicine makes use of only a small fraction of the toxins currently documented, but so far, about a dozen major drugs have emerged from animal venoms, National Geographic reported in 2013. One notable example: The injectable drug Byetta, marketed by
Next, Tatonetti and Romano plan to contribute data of their own to the newly launched VenomKB. The researchers are investigating potential uses of venom from the deadly African black mamba snake for treating chronic pain, diabetes and heart disease.