Tim Friede: I have been bitten by more than 200 snakes – on purpose

I know what it feels like to almost die from a snake bite. You can’t move. You can’t breathe. Your diaphragm is frozen. But we hear everything. So when I was in intensive care, I heard the doctors talking about me. “Why did he do that? Was it a suicide attempt?” And I’m like, no, that wasn’t the case. I just messed up.

I started injecting myself with snake venom in 2001, with the goal of developing a treatment. If you look at the numbers, 5 million people are bitten every year. There are 138,000 deaths each year and more than 400,000 amputations and other complications. These are pretty significant numbers.

Some organizations want to help, such as the global Strike Out Snakebite initiative, which seeks to raise awareness of the impact of snakebite envenomation. And there is snake antivenom, first invented 125 years ago by Albert Calmette. But these haven’t changed much since then, and they’re not perfect. They are made by injecting venom into horses and then collecting the antibodies produced by the horses. Using them in humans, you run the risk of anaphylactic shock because the antivenom is based on a foreign equine protein.

I wanted to take the horse out of the picture, but I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to lose a hand. I didn’t even want to miss work.

I had already taken a short course on extracting venom from spiders, scorpions and centipedes. This was in 1999, so it wasn’t too difficult to extract the snake venom. I started with cobra venom, injecting it at a dilution of 1 in 10,000. You don’t feel much of these doses. It’s a bit like a little bee sting. But slowly, over time, I increased my concentration to lethal doses – to pure venom.

Then I was ready for live snake bites. It was scary because I didn’t know for sure how immune I was. I didn’t know if I was going to make it or not. There is no book on this. No school can teach you how to do it. I had to learn on my own and use my own body for the experience.

And it was a horrible start. It was Wednesday, September 12, 2001, at 11:02 p.m. I remember it clearly: I took a cobra bite, then waited an hour and took another cobra bite. The first one suited me. But for the second, I had no immunity because all my antibodies were linked to the venom from the first bite. At midnight, I fell. Flat. I was in intensive care in a coma for four days. They had to give me antivenom from the local zoo. I actually had antivenom at home, but the ambulance crew didn’t know that.

When I left the hospital, I realized: I could either stop because I made a mistake, or I could learn from the experience and continue. I did the latter. I’ve had just over 200 stings now and have never used antivenom again.

I got really serious about this. I started contacting scientists. There is a long history of self-experimentation in medicine. I have a personal letter signed from Barry Marshall, who self-medicated and won a Nobel Prize. I also spoke to Peter Doherty, another Nobel laureate in immunity. And I’m like, “Holy shit, these people are taking me seriously.” That’s when I really got into academia, studying venom.

Snake venom, even if it is the same genus and species, can be completely different. The perfect example is the brown snake, Pseudonaja textilelisin Australia. In Queensland, in the north, its venom is different from that in the south. And that’s the problem with antivenoms: they’re meant for a certain area, so they might not work in another area.

I wanted to develop broad-spectrum antibodies in my blood that could protect me against all venoms. So I continued to work with different snakes from all over the world. There are about 650 species of venomous snakes and I knew I wasn’t going to inject the venom from all of them because I can’t access them all. I just tried to choose the most dangerous ones I could catch: taipans – these are the most venomous snakes in the world – cobras, kraits, coral snakes, rattlesnakes.

Taipan Bites are actually pretty easy. It’s pretty much a pure neurotoxin. But for vipers and pit vipers, their venom contains necrotic components that destroy muscles. It’s completely different. The pain is immense.

I have been studied six times in 25 years now. That was the most important thing for me. I wanted to be studied because if I’m not studied, I can’t contribute to the creation of new antivenoms. The most recent is the most important. Jacob Glanville of the vaccine company Centivax contacted me because of a YouTube video I had made, featuring a black mamba bite and a taipan bite back to back. I sent him some blood and they extracted the DNA from my B cells to clone my IgG antibodies. Then we started doing in vivo studies with mice.

The studies have been so intense, but the lab is so good. I discovered – and it’s quite scary – that we can neutralize the venom of the king cobra (Ophiophagus Hannah) with my antibodies, and I never used the king cobra in my experiments. So that gave us hope that we could get to a broad-spectrum level, a universal antivenom.

Last year the paper was published in Cell Press. It took almost 25 years to arrive at this document. My name is not on the list of authors. I used myself as a test subject and some people in academia look down on that. We were expelled from numerous journals, refused to publish even though my name appeared on the list of authors. But that doesn’t pose a problem to me. I don’t want distinctions.

It will still take a long time to get from mice to an antivenom that we can use in humans, but I have no problem waiting. I will wait for the day I die. But I can sleep well at night knowing that I did everything I could to make a difference.

As Colin Barras said