A press conference on this topic will be held Monday, March 23, at 10 a.m. Mountain time in the Colorado Convention Center.
DENVER, March 22, 2015 — Scientists will report in a presentation today that they have turned to the opossum to develop a promising new and inexpensive antidote for poisonous snake bites.
They predict it could save thousands of lives worldwide without the side effects of current treatments.
The presentation will take place here at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society.
The meeting features nearly 11,000 reports on new advances in science and other topics.
Worldwide, an estimated 421,000 cases of poisonous snake bites and 20,000 deaths from these bites occur yearly, according to the International Society on Toxicology.
In the early 1990s, a group of researchers identified a serum protein from the opossum that was able to neutralize snake venoms. »