But the Denver-based National Immunotherapy Consult Service, a snakebite advisory network for emergency room doctors, says there is an acute shortage, particularly in the West and Southeast. While Ransberger and his fellow Rattlesnake Roundup regulars exhibit West Texas sangfroid about all of this, the antivenin alert might unsettle those who don't wrestle diamondbacks for fun, particularly citizens of the Sun Belt's suburban sprawl, where subdivisions and McMansions are pushing farther and farther into rattler habitat. Snake venom is also providing a blueprint for new medicines for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune disorders, in which the body's defense mechanism against disease goes haywire and attacks itself. Venom proteins may also be used to create special targeting agents that piggyback a drug to a specific part of the body for maximum disease-fighting impact. Certain tissue needs to be destroyed.
Cancer needs to be destroyed.
So these venoms can be used for a therapeutic purpose. There's a whole world there for us to explore. We're not quite there. Their pace has been significantly accelerated by recent advances in genetic engineering and isolation of individual venom proteins and enzymes to determine which tissues they attack and how. Cash from interested drug companies also has been helpful.