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De novo designed proteins: a breakthrough in snakebite treatment

Published on March 31, 2026   8 min

Other Talks in the Playlist: Research Interviews

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Interviewer: We're joined today by Susana Vazquez Torres to discuss her recent Nature paper, which was published together with her colleagues at the lab of Prof. David Baker, recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024. The paper describes a successful engineering of the novel proteins that are capable of efficiently neutralizing little snake venom toxins. Susana, thank you so much for joining us today. Dr. Vazquez Torres: Thank you so much for the invitation. Interviewer: Can you start by sharing with us the need that you've identified and the approach that you've undertaken to address it? Dr. Vazquez Torres: We were interested in working on snakebite envenoming because it's a huge problem worldwide as it leads to a big number in mortality and morbidity, and the current treatments are not very good. They address this problem. But there are so many things that can be improved, and we thought that with protein design, we could make these treatments much more safer, more affordable, and more effective. Interviewer: What were the key challenges in your approach and how did you overcome them? Dr. Vazquez Torres: One of the big challenges that we had was to design proteins with high affinity and specificity. But not only that, we also wanted to design proteins that were able to neutralize toxins in vitro and in vivo. Those are two different challenges. But we were very lucky and privileged as we used these novel protein design methods that are very accurate to design these proteins. Even if the challenge was very big,

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De novo designed proteins: a breakthrough in snakebite treatment

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