Science
Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him Hundreds of Times
The video is just under two and a half minutes long. A slim man with close-cropped hair walks into a room, pulls a long black mamba — whose venom can kill within an hour — from a crate and allows it to bite his left arm. Immediately after, he lets a taipan from Papua New Guinea bite his right arm. “Thanks for watching,” he calmly tells the camera, his left arm bleeding, and then exits.
Over nearly 18 years, the man, Tim Friede, 57, injected himself with carefully calibrated, escalating doses of venom to build his immunity to 16 deadly snake species. He also allowed the snakes — mostly one at a time, but sometimes two, as in the video — to sink their sharp fangs into him about 200 times.
This bit of daredevilry (one name for it) may now help to solve a dire global health problem. More than 600 species of venomous snakes roam the earth, biting as many as 2.7 million people, killing about 120,000 people and maiming 400,000 others — numbers thought to be vast underestimates.
In Mr. Friede’s blood, scientists say they have identified antibodies that are capable of neutralizing the venom of multiple snake species, a step toward creating a universal antivenom, they reported on Friday in the journal Cell.
“I’m really proud that I can do something in life for humanity, to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away, that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably,” said Mr. Friede, who lives in Two Rivers, Wis., where venomous snakes are not much of a threat.
While deforestation, human sprawl and climate change have heightened the danger from snake attacks in recent years, research on antivenom has not kept pace with demand.
“This is a bigger problem than the first world realizes,” said Jacob Glanville, founder and chief executive of Centivax, a company that aims to produce broad-spectrum vaccines, and lead author on the study.
Dr. Glanville and his colleagues found that two powerful antibodies from Mr. Freide’s blood, when combined with a drug that blocks neurotoxins, protected mice from the venom of 19 deadly snake species of a large family found in different geographical regions.
This is an extraordinary feat, according to experts not involved in the work. Most antivenoms can counter the venom from just one or a few related snake species from one region.
The study suggests that cocktails of antitoxins may successfully prevent deaths and injuries from all snake families, said Nicholas Casewell, a researcher at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England.
“The principles of this study can definitely be applied to other snakes,” he said.
Mr. Friede’s first snake encounter, a harmless bite by a garter snake at age 5, started a lifelong fascination. “If I only knew back then what was going to happen,” he recalled, laughing uproariously.
But he didn’t begin dabbling with snakes in earnest until he was married with children and working in construction. He began experimenting with scorpions around the year 2000, but quickly switched to snakes. At one point, his basement lab housed 60 venomous snakes.
His experiments nearly ended soon after they began. On Sept. 12, 2001, crazed by the terrorist attack of the previous day and by the death of a friend a few days earlier, he let himself be bitten by two cobras. They were his first bites by live snakes, and he had not built up enough immunity. He was fine after the first bite, but after the second, he felt cold, his eyes started to droop and he couldn’t talk. He blacked out and woke up from a coma in a hospital four days later.
His wife was furious, but he was angrier with himself. He vowed to become more methodical in his work, carefully measuring out doses of venom and timing his bites.
“I’d work all day, come home, play with the kids and the family, and go downstairs and do my stuff all night long, wake up and do it again,” he said.
There were other mishaps — accidental bites, anaphylactic shocks, hives, blackouts. Mr. Friede describes himself as a nondegree scientist, but “there’s no college in the world that can teach you how to do it,” he said. “I was doing it on my own as best I could.”
Two teams of scientists sampled Mr. Friede’s blood over the years, but neither project led anywhere. By the time he met Dr. Glanville, in 2017, he was nearly ready to give up.
Dr. Glanville had been pursuing what scientists call broadly acting antibodies as the basis for universal vaccines against viruses. He grew up in a Maya village in the Guatemala highlands, and became intrigued by the possibility of using the same approach for universal antivenom.
At first, he said, he had a “humble” goal of finding someone like a clumsy snake researcher who had been bitten a couple of times. But then he came across news articles about Mr. Friede.
“I’ve been waiting for this call for a long time,” Dr. Glanville recalls Mr. Friede as saying.
In collaboration with Peter Kwong, an immunologist at Columbia University, Dr. Glanville isolated broadly acting antibodies from Mr. Friede’s blood and created the combination treatment.
The researchers tested antibodies from Mr. Friede’s blood against venom from 19 snake species. One broadly neutralizing antibody they identified protected mice from six of the species. Adding a small molecule called varespladib and a second antibody fully protected mice against 13 snake species, and provided a partial defense against the remaining six.
Cobras and mambas produce toxins that paralyze neurons. Venom from snakes in the viper family rips up tissues, causing victims to bleed to death. Each snake species within those families produces a distinct blend of dozens of toxins, and the venom even within a species can vary by region, age, diet and season.
But antivenom is made much the same way it was 130 years ago when it was first produced. A small amount of venom is pumped into a horse, camel or sheep, and the antibodies produced in response are harvested. The antibodies tend to be specific to the type of venom injected, and do little to ease symptoms from other types of snakes.
Many antivenoms, in fact, may pose more serious problems than venom itself, because the proteins from the mammal may trigger a deadly allergic shock.
Scientists are pursuing treatments that would avoid this side effect. Cocktails of small molecule drugs and monoclonal antibodies — artificially made copies of powerful human antibodies — against the most important toxin families may be able to neutralize the venom of many species, Dr. Casewell said.
The researchers next plan to test the treatment in Australia in any dogs that are brought into veterinary clinics for snakebites. They are also hoping to identify another component, perhaps also from Mr. Friede’s blood, that would extend full protection to all 19 snake species that were subjects of the research.
Mr. Friede himself is done now, however. His last bite was in November 2018, from a water cobra. He was divorced — his wife and children had moved out. “Well, that’s it, enough is enough,” he recalled thinking.
He misses the snakes, he said, but not the painful bites. “I’ll probably get back into it in the future,” he said. “But for right now, I’m happy where things are at.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services has joined a chorus of California hospitals and health systems lobbying the state for a $500-million emergency payment to public hospitals bracing for massive financial losses.
The California Assn. of Public Hospitals and Health Systems is requesting a one-time general fund payment in the 2026-27 budget to help cover inpatient care for fee-for-service Medi-Cal patients at the state’s 17 public hospitals.
While the exact percentage of the $500 million allocated to each hospital will depend on inpatient claims, the county expects that roughly 25%, or $125 million, will end up at Los Angeles County hospitals, said Dr. Christina Ghaly, director of LA Health Services.
“That’s the money that is really necessary to serve as a stopgap and continue that lifeline that the public hospitals desperately need, particularly with the state’s proposed shift of undocumented individuals from managed care into fee-for-service,” Ghaly said.
Ghaly praised county voters for passing Measure ER, which will provide an estimated $220 million annually for the next five years to the county health system through a new half-cent sales tax, Ghaly said.
But it’s not enough to stanch what the county estimates will be a $700-million annual loss by the 2028-29 fiscal year.
LA Health Services is the largest public health system in the state and second-largest in the nation. It serves as a safety net for the county’s 10 million residents, providing healthcare regardless of an individual’s ability to pay.
More than 80% of the system’s patients rely on Medi-Cal, Los Angeles General Medical Center Chief Executive Jorge Orozco told a state Senate committee in March.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Trump signed into law last summer, alters Medicaid eligibility requirements and includes about $1 trillion in federal Medicaid reductions over 10 years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. As a result, California is expected to lose tens of billions in total funding for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.
About 660,000 people in Los Angeles County are expected to lose Medi-Cal coverage, “but they will not stop needing healthcare,” Orozco said in March. “They will still come to our emergency rooms for everything from routine illness to life threatening conditions. And safety net hospital systems like ours will be forced to absorb those costs.”
County health officials have enacted hiring freezes, consolidated services, reduced overtime and taken other cost-cutting measures in anticipation of the losses, resulting in about $230 million in savings.
“But we need to be clear: we cannot cut our way out of a funding loss of this magnitude,” the department said in a statement released this week. “Without help from the State, we will be forced to consider options no one wants, reduced patient services, staff layoffs, and potential facility closures.”
The county has not yet identified specific services for closure, Ghaly said.
“Our focus is entirely on preventing the harm that would come before we have to make those tough choices,” she added.
A memo on the department’s fiscal outlook prepared for the Board of Supervisors sounded the alarm in April.
“For the patients we serve, losing Medi-Cal doesn’t mean they stop getting sick — it means losing access to care. Health Services will still be here, but with over 600,000 more uninsured patients in LA County alone, the strain will be felt across our health system and across every emergency room in Los Angeles County,” the memo read.
“Without substantial new revenue sources, Health Services will have no alternative but to consider planning for service curtailments — including possible facility closures and staff layoffs — beginning in early 2027.”
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By Cynthia Silva
June 10, 2026
Science
UC Davis favored less qualified Black, Latino med school applicants, Justice Department claims
The U.S. Justice Department has accused the UC Davis School of Medicine of choosing race “over merit, skill, and competence” in its admissions process, favoring Black and Latino students even when they weren’t as qualified as white and Asian applicants.
The department said its findings, announced Wednesday afternoon, were based on a six-month investigation by its Civil Rights Division. The Justice Department said it found that the Northern California university violated the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-based determinations in admissions. The findings have been contested by the school.
“Davis Med’s actions reflect both unabashed contempt for the rule of law and plain disregard for the potential public health consequences of putting race over merit, skill, and competence,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
“The Department will not allow schools to violate federal law without consequence.”
A spokesperson said the university was “disappointed” with the report and its findings.
“UC Davis School of Medicine strongly disagrees with any characterization of its admissions practices as discriminatory or inconsistent with applicable law,” a school statement read. “The report’s findings do not accurately reflect the school’s rigorous, individualized, and merit-based admissions process and our firm commitment to complying with applicable federal and state antidiscrimination laws.”
The department outlined its case in a 12-page letter to an attorney representing UC Davis, claiming the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, as interpreted by the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard.
Title VI prohibits institutions receiving federal funding from discriminating based on race, while the 2023 decision banned affirmative action in higher-education admissions.
The Justice Department said its investigation found the medical school “adopted admissions practices with the express purpose of circumventing” the 2023 ruling.
That method was the “Davis Scale,” the department said. The letter called the scale a “continuous measure of socioeconomic disadvantage” that includes parental income and education, growing up in a medically underserved area and other socioeconomic variables.
The Justice Department included UC Davis literature that said the scale had allowed the school to triple the enrollment of Black and Latino students.
In 2024, Davis’ medical school became the third most racially diverse medical school in the country, the Justice Department claimed.
Conversely, the department said its review of medical school admissions data from 2023 to 2025 found that 93% of white and certain Asian applicants had MCAT scores at or above those of the average Black student.
It also showed that Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted at rates up to six times higher than whites and Asians, despite consistently having, on average, lower academic qualifications, according to the department.
The Justice Department said it is attempting to enter into a voluntary agreement with UC Davis to bring the medical school into compliance. The department would eventually sue the medical school if such a resolution is not found.
UC Davis did not indicate whether it would comply with the Justice Department.
“UC Davis is fully committed to meeting the critical healthcare needs of California, particularly those in underserved and under-resourced areas,” the school said in a statement.
The finding mirrors similar investigations into medical schools at UCLA and UC San Diego.
The Justice Department said last month that UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine intentionally used race for the last three years to discriminate against white and Asian applicants during admissions.
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