Name: Deadly cures: how venomous animals could save your life | Glenn King | TEDxUQ
Uploaded: 2020-03-24T04:11:11.000Z
Duration: 18 min 20 s
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so my eye in today's to convince you that venomous animals, rather they vilify between actually several, but it is a source of life saving human therapeutic.

That leaving Australia will be well aware that we are literally surrounded by venomous animals, right?

But in fact, venomous animals are replete throughout the entire world because about 15% of all animal species on the planet are actually venomous.

Things like venomous spiders, bees, ants and what a common in suburban backyards right around the world.

Some are more exotic, like assassin bugs, which, interestingly, we find to be very prevalent in the local cemetery.

But we find these animals were way around the world and of those of us that live in Queensland.

No, there's no escaping these venomous animals when we venture into the ocean, because there's plenty of venomous marine animals as well, right octopus seeing him.

And he's a jellyfish sting rays, venomous snails that will talk about later.

And for the first fun effect of the day, did you know that many corals are actually venomous?

Corals are actually closely related to see enemies and jellyfish.

And they used the exact same type of stinging stills known as the man asides to deliver their venom and capture price.

So why do we have so many venomous animals in on the planet?

And the reason is the position of venoms transforms the act of capturing your prey from a physical battle.

And what that enables you to do is capture prey that's much bigger than you.

That's potentially dangerous, always just more mobile than you.

So this little crab spider here is killing a baby that is not only much larger than the spider, but has the potential to fly away.

Because it has venom that will rapidly immobilize that.

These are slow living snails that live at the bottom of the ocean, and remarkably, many of them prey on fish.

So how did these slow moving cone snails capture fish?

This sounds like something out of science fiction, but what they do is they take venom and they loaded into minuscule harpoons and they actually shooting at the fish and that instantaneously paralyzes the fish and they just really needed.

Some venomous animals are dangerous to us and snakes of the prime example, but no venomous animal has evolved to kill us.

And what that means is the vast majority of venomous animals are actually harmful to humans, and a classic example is the world's biggest spider, the Goliath torrential.

This is the real size these spiders can get.

And yet, like all torrential is, they're completely harmless to humans.

They pose no threat to us at all, and the other thing we have to remember is that all of these venomous animals play really important roles in their own ecosystems.

Which brings me to the second fun effect of the die, and that is that spiders make up 25 million tons of the Earth by a mess, and each year they get more tons of insect prey than the entire human population.

That's a lot of insects would probably be suffering from an insect apocalypse if it wasn't for these spiders eating these insects every single day.

When I started looking this 20 years ago, I had no idea.

And naively, I thought, Well, these secretions are probably not very complicated.

Why does the spider need more than a few insecticidal compounds to kill its prey?

What I'm going to show you is the very first experiment from 20 years ago that I ran to try and explore what was in the venom of the infamous a strange funnel web spider.

And this is a process that separates the venom components according to whether they're very water soluble or not.

So water soluble and the water soluble compounds come out first and always expecting a couple of pigs.

The picture just kept coming and coming and coming and coming.

There were, in fact, hundreds of compounds, at least in the venom of the spider.

The amazing thing was the ones that came at first that were very water soluble were small molecules, things like amino acids, neurotransmitters and all the rest.

We're small proteins or peptides about the size of human insulin.

And what we now know, quite remarkably, is the venom of the Australian funnel Web Spider contains more than 3000 different peptides.

We think it may be the most complicated chemical arsenal in the entire natural will.

So given that these venoms are so complex, have so many molecules in there the obvious question is 10 year old be a benefit in terms of trading human disease?

We already have six drugs that have been derived from venoms, and I'm gonna do examples off two of them.

The 1st 1 is the very first ever venom derived drug, and it comes from a deadly snake.

It comes from a Brazilian viper called bathrobes jamerica and what clinicians notices when people came into the hospital that had been invented, mated by the spider, that there was suffering from a precipitous drop in blood pressure.

And some smart people that screws pharmaceuticals said, What if we could work at what the molecule waas that cost a decrease in blood pressure?

Maybe that would be useful for people with high blood pressure and they did isolate that molecule.

They made a few changes and it became the world's first blockbuster anti hypertensive drug.

And all modern anti hypertensive drugs are derived from that molecule from that snake.

So that snake has certainly killed some people.

But the drug that we've got out of its venom has saved many more life.

The second example is a more recent one I like to give just cause.

It's an anti diabetic drug derived from the venom of the beautiful hell, a monster lizard.

It's a very successful, any diabetic drug on the point I want to make.

This one is that human chemists tried to take this peptide and make changes and make it better and tried a whole bunch of things.

But the drug that they ended up with was exactly the same molecule that in the venom of the lizard, they couldn't be the evolution that are going on in creating that.

The drug by ETA is the exact same molecule that you would find in the venom of this.

Listen so I want to talk a little bit now aboutthe sort of work that's going on here at the University of Queensland, specifically in my lab in this area, we use venoms to inspire the development of drugs to treat nervous system disorders in the particular disorder.

I think we've all been touched by somebody in our family or circle of friends who has suffered a stroke.

It is, after all, the second largest killer of people in the world.

It's the third largest course killer in Australia.

It's actually also the primary course of long term disability, and the reason for that is I'm sure you'll know is that stroke causes brain damage.

So one year after a stroke, 50% of survivors still require daily kid because of the disability they've suffered as a result of the strike.

And the problem is we have no therapeutic options for these people.

We have no drugs to prevent the brain damage after strike, not a single one.

There is a hemorrhagic stroke, which is a bleed in the brain, and for that there's no drugs at all.

You're at the mercy of what happens to your brain, the other top of strike.

It's in scheming stroke, where there's a clot in the artery leading to the brain.

And for that we have one drug called T P A.

To clot busting drugs and attempt to remove that clock.

The problem is, it can't be used in hemorrhagic stroke.

And even in a scheming strike, it could injuries, potentially an intracranial hemorrhage.

The reality used that only 5% of all stroke patients worldwide get this drunk.

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