Chapters Transcript Video Turning Tarantula Venom into Pain Relief what we need in medicine. Our new medications, new therapies with improved risk profile. There's been a push to understand how to develop other better, safer, less addictive or zero addictive potential medications or therapeutics for pain management for strong pain drugs like ibuprofen or aspirin are just not strong enough. Opioids are strong enough but they have the problem of tolerance development and addiction. So the promise of an any V 1.7 inhibitor would be that we have something that is as effective as an opioid but not addictive. Mhm spiders and scorpions have billions of years of evolution, optimizing peptide and protein and small molecule poisons and their venoms which we can take advantage of because the same venoms that can cause pain and neurological dysfunction can also help nerves work better and reduce pain. If you want to prevent a pain signal from traveling up, for example, from your leg from your diabetic foot to your brain, sodium channels are really what you want to go for. It turns out that tarantula toxin that binds to sodium channels, binds in a unique way to paralyze their victims. Uh and you know serve as lunch. Most venoms are a combination of poisons and if you separate out these poisons, they do different things And in some cases these poisons actually are beneficial thing that's going on with Vladimir's project. That's so exciting is to take the specific poison and then to modify it using modern computational techniques and then hepatitis synthesis to design it to reduce pain and a very, very specific channel in humans that is associated very much with the pain sensation. Mhm. Using Rosetta software, we can take natural peptide peptide from tarantula and then redesign it to make it into potential therapeutic. In the future. We allow a computer to make suggestions for us. Do we select the best suggestions based on multiple different criteria and then those peptides will synthesize and ultimately test in the lab based on our preliminary testing. Our little bites already show efficacy at the level of morphine, but no side effects of opioids. What Vladimir has put together is really fantastic because no one scientist could have any hope of tackling a project that is this hard. But having the collection of people that you've met today makes it fun and exciting. And I think gives us a real chance of relieving pain. Mm hmm. Created by
