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Editor in chiefEditor in Chief at Xataka On. Before joining Webedia, I was a tech reporter at Gizmodo and The Messenger. While I've covered all sorts of things related to technology, I'm specialized in writing about social media, Internet culture, Twitch, and streamers.
Tim Friede has always been fascinated with snakes. As a teen, he would look for garter snakes in the Wisconsin countryside. At home, he amassed a collection of snakes, from cobras to mambas, many of which are renowned for their venom.
Over the years, the 57-year-old’s love of snakes never wavered, but his caution did increase. The collector realized that it would be ideal to increase his immunity to snake bites so he could be safer while interacting with his pets. Since there is no universal antivenom for snake bites, Friede decided to create his own—by letting snakes bite him.
Biting your way to a cure. In Friede’s mind, letting snakes bite him would help his body produce antibodies in response to their venom and let it cope better if he was bitten in the future. In an interview with National Geographic, the collector explained that he exposed himself to snake venom in two ways.
One way involved milking his pet snakes for their venom and them injecting himself with it. The other way was more straightforward: just letting them literally bite him.
A near-death experience. Letting snakes have at you is a lot easier than it sounds, though. (Please don’t do this at home). Friede found out himself in 2001. That year, he was milking his pet Egyptian cobra—a process that includes making the snake bite down on a jar so that venom drips from its fangs—when it turned around and bit his finger.
The snake collector wasn’t fazed. He had already been working on his experiment for a while and had a certain degree of immunity. The problems began when he proceeded to handle a monocled cobra one hour later, which bit him, too.
“Two cobra bites, back to back, within one hour,” Friede told National Geographic in 2022. He spent four days in a coma during that incident. “I basically flat-lined and died. It wasn’t fun. I had enough immunity for one bite, but not for two. I completely screwed up.”
Instead of stopping, Friede decided to double-down, becoming even more scrupulous with his methods.
18 years, 650 doses, 200 bites. Over the next 18 years, Friede injected himself with 650 doses of carefully measured doses of snake venom from 16 different species. He also continued to let snakes bite him, usually one at a time. The self-taught snake expert estimates that he’s received roughly 200 bites. He documented some of his exploits on YouTube.
“I wanted to take the worst snakes on the planet and beat them,” Friede said.
A greater cause. While he originally started tinkering with snake venom as an experiment, Friede had a hunch that his hobby could help others, too. Scientists agreed. Two teams took samples of his blood over the years, though nothing came of those projects.
Friede was ready to give up on the idea until he received a call in 2017 from Jacob Glanville, a researcher who was studying whether broadly acting antibodies could serve as the basis for universal vaccines. Glanville wanted to apply the same approach to treat snake bites—which kill at least 81,000 people every year and cause disabilities for hundreds of thousands more— a universal antivenom, and he was looking for a test subject.
At first, Glanville had the “humble” goal of finding someone, such as a snake researcher, that had been bitten a few times over the course of their work. Instead, he found Friede and asked him if he could look at his blood.
“I’ve been waiting for this call for a long time,” Glanville remembered Friede saying when he contacted him.
The discovery. As it turns out, Friede was right. Glanville and Peter Kwong, a vaccine researcher at Columbia University, recently published a study in Cell detailing the discovery of two antibodies in Friede’s blood that, when combined with a drug that blocks neurotoxins, offered full or partial protection for 19 species of snakes.
The species in the study, which was conducted on mice, included coral snakes, mambas, taipans, and kraits found in different regions around the world.
Currently, most antivenoms can only work to treat bites from one or a couple of related snake species in a region. Experts that weren’t involved in the study say the work done with Friede’s blood could be “revolutionary.”
A universal antivenom. In their study, researchers say they anticipate their findings could apply to other snake toxin families, setting the groundwork for a potential universal human-derived antivenom.
Next up, the researchers plan to test their treatment on dogs brought in for treatment for snake bites in Australia. As for Friede, he’s still at the heart of the action. He works for Glanville’s biotech company, Centivax, though he’s not getting bitten anymore (for now).
“I’m really proud that I can do something in life for humanity, to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away, that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably,” Friede told The New York Times.
Image | David Clode
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