A molecule discovered in funnel-web spider venom can prevent the cascading cell death that often follows a heart attack or stroke, according to research by Glenn King and a team of his colleagues at the University of Queensland. More than 55,000 Australians have a heart attack each year and 68,000 have a stroke – physical traumas that are often fatal or that leave substantial and largely irreversible damage. Heart attacks and strokes together are big killers, responsible for 30 per cent of deaths worldwide, and strokes are the largest cause of long-term disability in Australia.
“Strokes lead to a spreading wave of destruction that can take hours to days to fully develop,” King says. “The hope is that we can develop a molecule similar to the one found in funnel-web venom that we can get in the hands of first responders. The earlier you can get in to start salvaging that brain tissue, the better.”
It can take people who live in a regional area three hours or more to get to hospital, King says, and two million nerve cells can be lost per minute once a stroke starts.
“If we could get the drug into the hands of first responders, they could give it to the patient right away and save a lot of brain tissue even before the patient got to hospital,” says King.
Discovered in 2016, the molecule in the venom of the K’gari funnel- web spider can also head off long- term damage to the heart caused by heart attacks, and it can potentially prevent injury to other organs deprived of oxygen. It can also delay cell death in hearts used in transplants and it can maintain the transplant organs’ viability for much longer than is currently possible.
King and his colleagues have set up a company in Australia, Infensa Bioscience, to further develop research into the potential benefits of the venom molecule. “We wanted to make sure the technology stayed in Australia and all benefits flowed back,” he says, adding that more than $23 million had been raised from Australian private investors.
The Infensa team hopes to begin phase one clinical trials of the venom molecule drug for heart attack later this year, King says. The trials entail escalating doses in healthy volunteers to ensure the drug is as safe as possible. King expects the journey to regulatory approval to take at least five years.
In 25 years working with venoms, King has found they have many and varied attributes. He developed one venom substance into the “world’s most eco-friendly insecticide”. Venoms are extremely complex, he says: the K’gari funnel- web spider venom is comprised of 3000 molecules – one compound is deadly; others can be therapeutic.
The university has possibly the world’s largest collection of invertebrate venoms, from more than 500 species, and if an ion channel, or cell pathway, has been determined as important in the progression of a disease, the venom collection becomes an important resource, with life-saving potential. “We can screen our venom collection to find a molecule that targets that particular ion channel,” King says, “and we can then test it in a model of that disease.”