Nature’s ‘Swiss Army Knife’: What Can We Learn From Venom?
10th November 2025
Medical interest in venom has long centered, reasonably enough, on snakebites. As many as five and a half million people per year — usually agricultural workers and children in Africa, Asia and Latin America — are bitten by venomous snakes. Those bites are responsible for more than 100,000 deaths, along with many more amputations, leading the World Health Organization to declare them “a neglected public health issue.”
But most venomous interactions take place outside our awareness, among invertebrates that we are liable to squish without a second thought. Now that researchers can, with the tiniest venom sample, identify every constituent molecule down to the last amino acid, they are discovering substances of extraordinary complexity. Tarantula venoms, for example, contain more than a hundred molecules. In the venoms of some spiders and snails, that number runs into the thousands.
Venom is generally considered distinct from poison. Whereas poison is passive — a substance, like a laundry-detergent pod or berries from a black nightshade plant, that can be lethal if ingested — venom must be actively administered by an animal, often via fangs, teeth or barbs, usually to capture prey or defend against predators. Nature has engineered this capacity surprisingly often. There are at least 1,250 species of venomous catfish alone, each with its own venom formula. Venomous creatures include insects, spiders, corals, mollusks, snakes, lizards and a few mammals (platypuses, shrews). Many of them, such as marine species, are difficult to observe in their natural habitats, and so we know next to nothing about how and why they use their toxins.
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Other applications being investigated in other labs include a scorpion peptide that binds precisely to malignant tumors, including those in the brain. This peptide is engineered to be fluorescent so that during surgery to remove a tumor, doctors can see whether they have cut it all out. Eventually, similar molecules may be programmed to kill cancer cells outright, without chemotherapy or radiation, says Jim Olson, a professor at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the University of Washington, who initiated the project. A peptide from sea-anemone venom is in clinical trials as a treatment for some autoimmune diseases, according to Christine Beeton, the immunologist leading the investigations at the Baylor College of Medicine. In Brazil, a biochemist and neuroscientist, Maria Elena de Lima, is developing a peptide derived from the venom of a banana spider to treat erectile dysfunction.