Around 140,000 people die annually from venomous snakes, and another 400,000 are permanently injured.
Most snake bites can be treated with anti-venom, but it's difficult to store and not readily available.
Nicholas Casewell, who heads the Centre for Snakebite Research & Interventions at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and his colleagues were busy using the gene-altering CRISPR to try and find more pragmatic solutions to cobra bites.
They tracked down the human genes that cause tissue death around the site of the bite. They knocked out genes in each of the skin cells in a culture while pouring liquid cobra venom onto them — enough to kill each individual cell. When some of the cells survived, they grew these cells in new cultures and then sequenced them, to see if they could find genetic markers that separated them from the rest.
And what did they find in those cells that was different from the others?
The surviving cells contained heparin: a readily available and cheap blood-thinning medicine.
The discovery is being treated as some kind of miracle finding, and they're calling for clinical trials to see if heparin actually makes a difference in cobra bites.
Before it can be used to treat cobra bites in the field, the scientists will need to test it further in clinical trials.
But, news flash, there have already been limited clinical trials in the 1970s and 1980s that showed that heparin helped with snake bites, especially in limiting damage caused by venom.
The biggest problem with heparin is that it's cheap and readily available, and most importantly, it's been around for years, so there's no way for a pharmaceutical company to patent it.
So far, they have just done research into cobra bites, a major problem in many countries, and are asking for clinical trials into treating cobra bites.
Next, the CRISPR researchers will turn their focus to vipers, another type of venomous snake.
Having a "doc in the box" option for stabilizing a snake bite in a remote area would be amazing!
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