Omics Meets Biology: Application to the Design and Preclinical Assessment of Antivenoms

18 páginas, 3 figuras.
Snakebite envenoming represents a neglected tropical disease that has a heavy public health impact worldwide, mostly affecting poor people involved in agricultural activities in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania. A key issue that complicates the treatment of snakebite envenomings is the poor availability of the only validated treatment for this disease, antivenoms. Antivenoms can be an efficacious treatment for snakebite envenoming, provided they are safe, effective, affordable, accessible and administered appropriately. The shortage of antivenoms in various regions, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and some parts of Asia, can be significantly alleviated by optimizing the use of current antivenoms and by the generation of novel polyspecific antivenoms having a wide spectrum of efficacy. Complementing preclinical testing of antivenom efficacy using in vivo and in vitro functional neutralization assays, developments in venomics and antivenomics are likely to revolutionize the design and preclinical assessment of antivenoms by being able to test new antivenom preparations and to predict their paraspecific neutralization to the level of species-specific toxins.
Funding for the projects described in this paper was provided by Grants BFU2007–61563 and BFU2010–17373 from the Ministerios de Educación y Ciencia and Ciencia é Innovación, Madrid, joint programme Fundación Costa Rica-USA/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CRUSA-CSIC) (2007CR0004 and 2009CR0021) and Programa Iberoamericano de Ciencia y Tecnología para el Desarrollo (CYTED) (206AC0281). Travelling between Spain and Costa Rica was financed by Acciones Integradas 2006CR0010 between CSIC and the University of Costa Rica (UCR).
We acknowledge support by the CSIC Open Access Publication Initiative through its Unit of Information Resources for Research (URICI)