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Asked by anon-251263 on 21 Apr 2020.
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Ella Mercer answered on 21 Apr 2020:
It is true, yes! One example is the venom from the pit viper- it was used to make a medicine for abnormally high blood pressure and is one of the most commonly prescribed medicines today!
I wonder if the other scientists can think of other examples?
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Anabel Martinez Lyons answered on 21 Apr 2020: last edited 21 Apr 2020 9:26 am
Yes! Another example would be vaccines. We can attenuate (which means scientifically change to become non-dangerous) a virus or bacterium and give it to children or adults as a vaccination to protect them against the real virus or bacterium. It allows our bodies to create antibodies (special immune system proteins) that can recognise and raise an immune response should we ever get the ‘real deal’. This has allowed us to combat a huge number of infectious diseases, including typhoid, polio and this method has even allowed us to eliminate some diseases, like small pox!
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Freya Harrison answered on 21 Apr 2020:
Absolutely! Cancer drugs are usually pretty deadly things, because the best way to treat cancer is to kill the cancerous cells. So we have to use things (drugs, radiotherapy) that kill human cells. Sometimes we can target these very well to cancer cells, but but sometimes we can’t, and this is why cancer treatments can have such nasty side effects. For example, cancer cells tend to divide very rapidly, so we can use drugs that only damage rapidly-dividing cells and leave others alone. This is why chemo drugs can make people’s hair fall out, because the cells in your hair follicles divide rapidly. It’s also why chemo and radiotherapy affect people’s immune systems, because immune cells are being made and dividing all the time, and so they get targeted by the therapy too.
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Robert Ives answered on 21 Apr 2020:
Absolutely. As Freya says, cancer medicine can be particularly dangerous. Actually, most medicines are strong poisons. Think about how big we (humans) are and how small the amount of medicine we take is. For some medicines, the amount we take can be less than 1 milligram per day (such as some of the medicine for lung disease like asthma). That’s about 75 million times smaller than the average adult human. That tiny amount is enough to help us feel better, yet if we took say 1 gram (about the size of a paracetamol tablet so still a very small amount), some of those medicines could be very dangerous for us. That’s why, when we develop medicines, we need to know both how much is needed for it to benefit us AND how little is needed to harm us. If it causes us more harm than benefit, we cannot use the medicine. Most people would not accept any harm from a medicine to cure a headache, but might accept some harm for a medicine to cure a cancer because the benefit is so much greater.
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Gabriela da Silva Xavier answered on 21 Apr 2020:
Yes, some components of animal venom have proven to be quite useful as drugs. For example, a very effective anti-diabetes drug called exendin-4 was isolated from Gila monster venom.
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Philip Denniff answered on 23 Apr 2020:
As the other scientists have said known toxins from the natural world are very effectively used in medicines. However what is less well known is that all medicines are toxic at high enough doses. The pharmaceutical industry spends a lot of time finding both the ‘no observed adverse effect level ‘ (NOAEL for short) which is the highest dose that can be given without causing harm and the ‘therapeutic dose’ the amount of drug required to cure the disease. Ideally there should be a wide gap between NOAEL and the therapeutic dose.
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anon-251263 commented on :
Thanks all very interesting answers, I’ve learnt loads