Tim Friede has been documenting being bitten by hundreds of snakes on Youtube for years.
If you've got the stomach for it, here's one of those videos taking a bite from a black mamba and a taipan back to back.
With the goal of becoming immune to all snake bites, he's also injected himself with snake venom 700 times. While a back-to-back rattlesnake bite did put him in a coma once, overall, Friede has survived and is still healthy.
Dr Jacob Glanville, chief executive of biotech company Centivax, saw what Friede was doing and reached out to him.
The first call, I was like 'this might be awkward, but I'd love to get my hands on some of your blood.'
Centivax is looking for the holy grail of snake bites: a universal antivenom. Currently, antivenom has to be very specific to the species of snake, but if the antibodies in the antivenom could target parts of the venom that are similar instead of the unique aspects, more lives could be saved around the world.
Friede has apparently developed those antibodies.
An experiment documented in Cell showed that a combination of Friede's antibodies gave venom protection to mice.
LNX-D09 alone fully protected against lethal venom challenges from four cobra species, black mamba, and king cobra, even with a 10-min treatment delay. When combined with the PLA2 inhibitor varespladib, complete protection extended to the tiger snake, inland taipan, and coastal taipan, mainly due to the effects of varespladib. Adding SNX-B03 further extended full protection to the common krait, mulga, Eastern coral snake, and banded krait. The cocktail also provided partial protection against the Russian cobra, Javan spitting cobra, Arabian cobra, Western green mamba, and common death adder.
You'd love to chalk this up to the amazingness of science, but really it's all because one crazy dude decided he wanted to make himself immune to snake bites.
No doubt to one day challenge a Sicilian to a battle of wits and rescue a princess bride.
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