A man let snakes bite him 202 times. His blood helped create a new antivenom

Tim Friede remembers his worst snakebites in screaming detail.

The first was from an Egyptian cobra. The second, an hour later, from a monocled cobra. Both bites occurred at his home in Wisconsin. Both were from highly venomous snakes. Neither bite was an accident.

Friede let the cobras bite him on purpose ­­— now, he’s logged 202 snakebites, in total. “It always burns and it’s always, always painful,” he says. After the back-to-back cobra bites, Friede had to be airlifted to the hospital and spent four days in a coma. “Was it a mistake? Yes. Was it stupid? Yes,” he says. But he’s in it for the science.

For nearly 20 years,  Friede has “self-immunized” against venom from some of the world’s deadliest snakes. The process involved milking venom from snakes and then injecting tiny — followed by increasingly larger ­— doses into his body.  

Think The Princess Bride, says Jacob Glanville, president and CEO of the biotech company Centivax. In the 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, Glanville says. He slowly and methodically injected ever-greater amounts of venom into his body over months and years, eventually building up immunity to more than a dozen venomous snakes, including coral snakes, black mambas and rattlesnakes. Then, he’d let snakes bite him. Without that slow buildup, bites by “most of those snakes would have killed him,” Glanville says.

But Friede survived. That’s because he’s got what may be a one-of-a-kind assortment of antibodies cruising through his bloodstream. These molecules can neutralize the toxins rampant in different venoms — and they may, one day, help accidental snakebite victims, too.

Glanville, who is working to develop a universal flu vaccine, was interested in other examples where broad immunity might be useful in medicine. Snakebites immediately came to mind. Venomous snakebites kill up to about 140,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization. More than 600 species of venomous snakes exist; creating antivenoms for each one takes time and money. Glanville wanted to create a single antivenom that could target toxins from different venomous snakes. He thought Friede, someone who’d been bitten multiple times by multiple 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.’” Friede responded, “I have been waiting so long for this call.” He had been involved in small studies before, but many of them weren’t published and other projects just didn’t go anywhere. Glanville’s did.

Using a small sample of Friede’s blood, Glanville and his colleagues developed an antivenom cocktail that can quell the effects of certain venoms. A combination of just two of Friede’s antibodies plus a toxin-blocking drug called varespladib completely protected mice from an otherwise lethal dose of venom from 13 different kinds of snakes, and partially protected mice from the venom of an additional six species, the researchers report May 2 in Cell.

“This is perhaps the best combination published today,” says Andreas H. Laustsen-Kiel, a biotechnologist at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby who was not involved with the work. The research is part of a recent push from a handful of labs, including Lausten-Kiel’s, to create better antivenoms. Scientists have hunted through billions of synthetic antibodies to find ones that target key venom toxins, used AI to dream up new toxin-neutralizing proteins and repurposed an old drug as a potential new tool for fighting viper venom.

All that progress doesn’t mean Glanville’s cocktail is ready for prime time. “It’s an experimental antivenom,” Lausten-Kiel says. “It’s a proof of principle.”

Across venomous snake species, there are about 10 toxin families that are key targets for antivenoms, says study coauthor Peter Kwong, a structural virologist at Columbia University. The newly developed antivenom cocktail targets three. That’s enough to move on to the next phase of testing. The researchers are looking to collaborate with veterinary groups in Australia to potentially treat dogs that come in with snakebites.

And the team can always look for more antivenom components, Glanville says, by going back to the billions of antibodies they found in Friede’s blood. Friede retired from snakebites and self-administered injections in 2018 (after 202 snakebites and 654 immunizations). Today, he’s a healthy 57-year-old who’s had regular liver and kidney checkups to ensure that his history of venom exposures hasn’t damaged his organs.

“Tim did something remarkable, and we think it could change medicine,” Glanville says. But he emphasizes that 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.”