AI-designed antivenoms could help treat lethal snakebites

Jan 15, 2025

Susana Vasquez-Torres, a researcher at the University of Washington, discusses her groundbreaking work on AI-designed antivenoms for snakebites, aiming to tackle a major public health crisis. She reveals how machine learning has enabled the design of proteins that could offer effective treatment in resource-limited settings. Jeff Tollefson, a Nature journalist, shares urgent insights into Earth's temperature surpassing 1.5°C for the first time, stressing the implications for climate policy and immediate action needed to combat climate change.

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Intro

00:00 • 2min

Innovative Antivenoms: Combatting Snake Bites with AI

01:34 • 11min

Uncovering Sensory Mechanisms and Brain Cleansing in Animals

12:17 • 3min

Climate Threshold Breached: A 2024 Wake-Up Call

14:57 • 10min

Mars Sample Return: Challenges and Innovations

25:04 • 5min

Exploring Notable Bacterial Pathogens and Their Research Implications

30:32 • 2min

Challenges in Microbial Research: Data Scarcity and AI Applications

32:02 • 2min

Exploring Microbiology and AI: The Future of Scientific Discovery

33:53 • 2min

00:46 Designing new antivenoms to treat snakebites

Researchers have shown that machine learning can quickly design antivenoms that are effective against lethal snake-toxins, which they hope will help tackle a serious public health issue. Thousands of people die as a result of snakebites each year, but treatment options are limited, expensive and often difficult to access in the resource-poor settings where most bites occur. The computer-aided approach allowed researchers to design two proteins that provided near total protection against individual snake toxins in mouse experiments. While limited in scope, the team behind the work believe these results demonstrate the promise of the approach in designing effective and cheaper treatments for use in humans.

Research Article: Vázquez Torres et al.

11:28 Research Highlights

How male wasp spiders use hairs on their legs to sniff out mates, and how noradrenaline drives waves of cleansing fluid through the brain.

Research Highlight: Male spiders smell with their legs

Research Highlight: How the brain cleans itself during deep sleep

13:53 Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time

News broke last week that in 2024, Earth’s average temperature climbed to more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. Although this is only a single year so far, we discuss what breaking this significant threshold means for the 2015 Paris climate agreement and what climate scientists understand about the speed that Earth is heating up.

Nature: Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time: what does it mean?

23:39 Briefing Chat

NASA delays deciding its strategy for collecting and returning Mars rocks to Earth, and why papers on a handful of bacterial species dominate the scientific literature.

Nature: NASA still has no plan for how to bring precious Mars rocks to Earth

Nature: These are the 20 most-studied bacteria — the majority have been ignored

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