There’s a Perfectly Good Reason to Mass-Produce Snake Venom
Lab-grown glands can now produce realistic cocktails of toxins, which could help address one of the world’s biggest and most neglected health crises.
The venom glands of snakes are among nature’s most potent weapons. Hans Clevers can now grow them in his lab, mass-producing little disembodied blobs that secrete the same cocktail of toxins as their natural counterparts. When I asked him where the idea of doing this came from, he chuckled. “That is what I asked my Ph.D. students,” he said.
, Clevers realized that stem cells from a mouse’s gut, when bathed in the right chemicals, could produce organoids—miniature versions of full organs. These lentil-size blobs were simplistic replicas, but they captured many of the important features of their parent organs, from their architecture to the genes they activate. Many labs have
