Partnering with the Technical University of Denmark on Antibodies against Animal Venom Toxins

We’re excited to announce a partnership with the Technical University of Denmark to develop engineered recombinant antibodies specific for animal toxins, such as toxins from snake venoms. Antibodies targeting various snake and spider toxins are now available via our reagents catalog in newly engineered formats, providing valuable research tools for scientists worldwide striving to produce better antivenom treatments.

Snakebite Envenoming

More than five million people are bitten by snakes worldwide every year, resulting in 100,000 deaths, and many more amputations and other permanent disabilities. The only currently available treatment is antivenom derived from animal plasma, which is expensive and can result in serious adverse reactions. However, snakebite research has been hampered by limited attention and a lack of useful research tools. The World Health Organization (WHO) has therefore declared snakebite envenoming a neglected tropical disease to increase research toward better therapies and diagnostics.

Engineered Recombinant Antibodies

The newly available toxin-specific antibodies are valuable tools for researchers studying snake venoms. Originally developed by the laboratory of Andreas Hougaard Laustsen at the Technical University of Denmark, the antibodies target cytotoxins and phospholipases A₂ from African cobras, latrotoxin from widow spiders, and myotoxin II from lancehead vipers. Under our new partnership, Absolute Antibody has engineered the antibodies into new recombinant formats.

The original antibodies, discovered by phage display, were single-chain Fv fragments (scFvs), an unusual format for research as they can’t be detected by traditional secondary antibodies and have a short half-life and no effector function in vivo. Using recombinant antibody technology, the antibodies have been engineered into new formats designed to open up new experimental possibilities.

In addition to a recombinant version of the original scFv, the antibodies are becoming available in a human IgG1 format for use as serological controls in neutralization assays; mouse IgG1 and rabbit IgG formats for detection applications; and sheep IgG formats to enable better comparisons to traditional polyclonal sheep-derived antivenom.

Check out the currently available antibodies below. Recombinant anti-venom antibodies are fairly novel to the research community, so we’d love to hear from you if there are other antibody formats that would be beneficial to this area of research – with our antibody engineering technology, if you can describe it, we can make it! Contact us to discuss.