More people die of snakebite each year than by natural disasters. The World Health Organization estimates the death toll due to snake bite to be over 100,000 annually. In developing countries, the current method of producing antivenom involves extracting venom from a snake and injecting it into a horse, then later collecting the horse serum. This approach confers considerable suffering to the horse, that may receive up to 12 different snake venoms in order to produce a multivalent antivenom. In addition, the incidence of allergic reactions from receiving horse serum by injection is very high. Because the cost to produce this type of antivenom is relatively low, the only way to replace the technology is to develop a lower cost antivenom. The North American Opossum (Didelphis virginiana) possesses a natural resistance to rattlesnake envenomation. Various proteins from opossum serum were identified that had a highly conserved N-terminus. Lipps found in 1996 that a short peptide, the N-terminal 10-15 amino acids of one of the opossum proteins (Lethal Toxin Neutralizing Factor) was able to neutralize rattlesnake and other snake venoms. We have expressed the peptide as a concatenated chain of eight peptides downstream of an Elastin-Like Peptide (ELP) to facilitate the downstream processing of the LTNF-11 peptide chain. The presentation will discuss the production and purification of LTNF-11 using the ELP tag as well as activity assays of purified peptide in mice.

Snake antivenom peptide production using elastin-like peptide tag

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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