Tim Friede remembers his worst snakebites in screaming detail. The first was from an Egyptian cobra. The second, an hour later, came from a monocled cobra. Both were highly venomous snakes. Each occurred at his home in Wisconsin. And neither was an accident.

“Was it stupid? Yes,” he says. But, he adds that he had been in it for the science.

Someday, these might help others survive snakebites, too.  

Friede let the cobras bite him — on purpose. To date, he’s logged 202 snakebites. “It always burns,” he says. “And it’s always, always painful.”

He had to be airlifted to a hospital after those first back-to-back cobra bites, nearly 20 years ago. He would go on to spend four days in a coma.

Friede has been “self-immunizing” himself against some of the world’s deadliest snakes. The process involves milking venom from snakes. Then he’d inject tiny doses into his body, followed by increasingly larger ­ones. 

Think The Princess Bride, says Jacob Glanville. In that movie, Westley built up immunity to the poisonous (and fictional) iocane powder by gradually exposing himself to it over time.

That’s essentially what Friede did, says Glanville. He’s the president and CEO of the biotech company Centivax.

Friede slowly and carefully injected ever-bigger amounts of venom into his body over months and years. His body eventually built up immunity to more than a dozen venomous snakes. These include coral snakes, black mambas and rattlesnakes.

Afterward, he’d let snakes bite him. Without that slow preparation, bites by “most of those snakes would have killed him,” Glanville says.

Instead, Friede survived.

Sort of like a painful vaccine

Antibodies are proteins that help our bodies recognize and fight off threats such as germs. Vaccinations lead our bodies to build up protective antibodies against disease-causing germs. But antibodies can also neutralize the toxins found in different venoms.

All of Friede’s injections left his bloodstream with what may be a one-of-a-kind mix of antibodies to snake venoms. Those antibodies may someday help accidental snakebite victims, too.

Antivenoms can stop the effects of toxins in snakebite victims. Glanville’s team has now used antibodies from Friede’s blood to make a new antivenom.

Glanville had already been working on a vaccine to protect against many different flu viruses. He also was interested in finding cases where broader immunity might be useful — and snakebites came to mind.

More than 600 species of venomous snakes slither across the planet. Creating an antivenom for each one takes time and money. Glanville wanted to create an antivenom that could target toxins from many types of venomous snakes at once. He thought Friede — someone who’d been bitten so many times and by so many snakes — could help.

Glanville contacted Friede after reading about him in the news. “I said, ‘This might be an awkward question, but I would really like to get some of your blood.’”

Said Friede: “I have been waiting so long for this call.”

The man had been involved in small studies before. But many weren’t published. And some projects never went anywhere.

Glanville’s would.

Toxin-blocking concoction

Glanville’s research team used a small sample of Friede’s blood. The antivenom cocktail they developed from it can now quash the effects of several venoms.

They made it from a combo of two of Friede’s antibodies plus a toxin-blocking drug (varespladib). This mix completely protected mice from lethal doses of venom from 13 different species of snakes. It partially protected mice from the venoms of six more.

The researchers shared their findings in the June 12 issue of Cell.

So far “this is perhaps the best combination published,” says Andreas H. Laustsen-Kiel. He’s a biotechnologist at Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. He didn’t take part in the new antivenom work.

Glanville’s research is part of a recent push in a handful of labs — including Lausten-Kiel’s — to create better antivenoms. Scientists have looked through billions of lab-created antibodies in search of ones that target key venom toxins. Some used AI to dream up new toxin-neutralizing proteins. And one old drug has been repurposed as a potential new tool for fighting viper venom.

None of these, even Glanville’s cocktail, is ready for prime time. “It’s an experimental antivenom,” Lausten-Kiel says. It still needs to be tested for safety and how well it works in people.  

Across venomous snakes, there are about 10 toxin families that pose key targets for antivenoms, says study coauthor Peter Kwong. He studies the structures of proteins from viruses and other toxin sources at Columbia University in New York. The newly developed snake-antivenom cocktail targets three toxin families. That’s enough to move on to the next phase of testing.

The researchers are now looking to work with veterinary groups in Australia to potentially treat dogs that come in with snakebites.

And, Glanville adds, the team can always look for more antivenom ingredients in the billions of antibodies they found in Friede’s blood.

Friede retired from snakebites and venom injections in 2018 (after 202 snakebites and 654 immunizations). Today, he’s a healthy 57-year-old. He has had regular liver and kidney checkups. Those ensure that his history of venom exposures hasn’t damaged these organs.

“Tim did something remarkable, and we think it could change medicine,” Glanville says. But, he emphasizes, no one should be injecting themselves with snake venom.

“We are actively discouraging anybody from trying it,” he says. “No one ever needs to do it again.”