Animal toxins in drug discovery

Spiders, scorpions, insects as well as some marine animals have the capacity to produce venoms. Given their high and complex content of peptides, venoms are increasingly being considered for their potential therapeutic use. Commercially available drugs already exist for alleviating pain in HIV and blood coagulation and are mostly based on snake and cone venom peptides. Currently, the pharmaceutical industry is investing more and more in venom-based drugs.

To study the diversity and pharmacology of venom peptides, scientists on the EU-funded VENOMICS project propose to generate the largest synthetic peptide library. To address the challenge of investigating part of the 170 000 venomous animals, consortium partners are combining proteomics, performed on venoms, and transcriptomics, performed on venom glands, extracted from 200 species.

They are generating a high-throughput workflow based on the largest collection of venom and tissue samples ever studied. The idea is to identify all the toxins expressed in venom glands and characterise peptide maturation occurring in the venom. In turn, this will allow the generation of 50 000 toxin sequences. From these, the 5 000 most interesting will be produced by chemical synthesis or recombinant expression.

Validation of both the approach and the selected peptides as drug candidates will be performed in functional and receptor-targeted assays specifically linked to age-related pathologies.

VENOMICS project open a new avenue in venoms exploration and exploitation with the development of unique technologies without any limitation issues associated with the availability of natural products.

The study is being performed at a scale never attempted before, and the generated libraries will feed into the drug pipeline. Overall, the VENOMICS drug discovery approach could offer innovative drugs as novel treatments for several medical conditions.