Snake Bite Man meets Biotech Scientist creates Breakthrough Antivenom Vaccine … Dr. Jake Glanville, Founder, Chairman & CEO of Centivax
You know that recent news story about the fellow who deliberately let himself be bitten by venomous snakes and the scientist who turned his blood into the most powerful antivenom ever? The scientist is biotech entrepreneur, doctor Jake Glanville, and he's here today to take us from his first conversation with the gentleman through to the creation of an unprecedented antivenom. It's a great science story, and it's a great biotech story. Doctor. Glanville, Jake, welcome back to the program.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Moira, so good to be back talking with you.
Dr.Moira Gunn:Now many of us have heard the news that a man had intentionally let himself be bitten over 200 times by venomous snakes. And I must say many of us said, what a terrible idea. That just sounds awful on fifty fifty counts. But I know you had a different reaction. And before we get to that reaction, remind us all about this man and what he did.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Yeah. So Tim Friedy is a man from Wisconsin who, for seventeen years and nine months of his life, he collected venomous snakes from around the world. He injected himself with six fifty four doses of escalating venom from cobras, taipans, black mambas, common kraits, western diamondback rattlers, and a number of other species, until he had built up enough immunity that he then would allow these snakes, snakes that would normally kill a horse, to be able to bite him, to demonstrate that he developed universal immunity to snake venom.
Dr.Moira Gunn:Now while many of us didn't hear about him till last May, you heard about him earlier. How did you hear about him? When was that? And what idea came to you when you heard the story?
Dr. Jake Glanville:So I first got in contact with Tim Friedy in 02/2017. My day job is working on universal immunity in the area of universal vaccines. This is this emerging appreciation that unlike our current vaccines that work against a single strain, so for instance, a flu shot that you take, and then they change the strains next year because the flu mutates. And the same idea for coronaviruses, and really the same reason we don't have a working HIV vaccine yet. The idea was that these viruses have these Achilles heels, these conserved spots that are unable to mutate.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And if you can just teach the immune system to target those conserved spots, then you'd have a vaccine that worked against not just one strain, but all of the strains, a universal vaccine. So I was working on this, and around that same time, the World Health Organization was starting to sound the alarm about snake envenomation as a neglected tropical disease that affects actually a large number of people, but there hasn't been nearly enough investment in the development of antivenoms. Part of the problem is there's a huge number of snakes, kind of like there's a huge number of flu strains, and those snakes have different venom. So I started thinking about it, and I was wondering, I wonder if the same biology that makes universal vaccines possible, I wonder if that might also be true of venom, that they might have these Achilles heels and we could target them. At the time, I had worked for four years at Pfizer doing antibody engineering to use antibodies as drugs, and then I had created a company called Distributed Bio that was also doing that.
Dr. Jake Glanville:One of the key things you learn from doing this kind of work is that you really prefer to have human antibodies as the basis of a medicine. Anti venom is not made from human antibodies. It's historically made from animals like horses that are envenomed repeatedly from snake venom, and then their antisera, their blood, essentially is the product. This was very crude technology that's been around for January, and yet if you have the right antivenom for that right snake, it can save your life. But of course, you'd rather those antibodies be human.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so I thought, I wonder if I could find a person who has I could start searching through their immune system and find some of these universal antibodies. We call them broadly neutralizing antibodies. And so I was searching around. Originally, I was trying to find a clumsy snake researcher who may have been bit a couple times because they're basically getting vaccinated each time you get bit. And I was hoping that would be an okay place to start.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And it would have had problems because just like getting one flu shot, they probably would just make antibodies against that one snake, and and that's the same problem that the horses have. That's why antivenoms only work against one or a couple species. But then I as I was looking, I found these amazing articles about this guy, Tim Friedy, who had this astonishing history. Not only had he had a huge number of snakes he was exposed to, I was looking at it as a vaccine scientist, and I was like, Wait a second. Because he kept rotating between these 16 different species from every continent, that suggested to me that if anybody anywhere had beating through their veins the secret of a universal antivenom, it would be this man.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so I knew I had to get in contact with him.
Dr.Moira Gunn:So how did you find him? I mean
Dr. Jake Glanville:It was tough. This guy was not motivated to do this for attention, so he wasn't anywhere on the Internet. The only thing I could find were these articles, and there was, like, a couple YouTube videos about it. And so I eventually got in contact with him by contacting the the reporters. And I said, hey.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Look. I really wanna be able to to talk to this guy. And so one of them eventually put me in touch. And and I remember the first phone call, you know, I called him, and, and I said, you know, this this might be an awkward question, but I would love to get my hands on some of your blood.
Dr.Moira Gunn:I want your blood. Right out there.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Yeah. Well, you gotta you gotta that's what you know, you gotta shoot your shot. And, you don't know how someone's gonna respond to a question like that. It's a little vampiric. But the cool thing was that his answer to me was, I've been waiting for this call for a long time.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And what I realized about Tim was that he had done this for that entire period of time to prove that it was done, but his goal was to then get research because he felt and was anticipating that he had something special in his blood, and if the researchers looked at it, that they could create a universal antivenom. So he was anticipating this problem, and that was one of his major motivations for doing what he did. And so I immediately said, okay. Well, how do we start collaborating to do this?
Dr.Moira Gunn:So now the science kicks in. First of all, you have to check his story.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Yeah. So first, we had to spend, you know, four months doing some boring but important stuff, which was we needed to make sure we had an ethical study design. What Tim does is inherently dangerous. To state the obvious, do not do this at home. Venom is not safe.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so when we were doing the study, we needed to make sure that we didn't do anything that imposed any additional risk to him. And so what we settled on was a non interventional study design. This is the same kind of research design people do when they're looking at HIV patients or high risk people for various reasons. And what it was was that we weren't going to give him any feedback on what venoms to take or how he had his existing process, and we weren't going to touch that at all other than to send him documents that say, Hey, snake venom's dangerous. You know, he was like, Yeah, thanks.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Thanks for the tip. And then we would just take two blood draws twenty eight days apart, as part as he was doing his standard maintenance self immunizations.
Dr.Moira Gunn:Oh, he was continuing to to get bitten and immunize himself?
Dr. Jake Glanville:During that time, yeah. He had retired by 02/2018, but we drew the blood when he was still doing it. And so once we got the framework figured out, that includes setting up, an informed consent to draw the blood and requesting an IRB. There's some things you do. There are paperwork to make sure you can study a human subject.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Then we we drew two twenty milliliter blood draws. That was the basis of all that research. It was shipped to my laboratories. A couple interesting things you find when you do this kind of work. One is there are these mobile blood drawing units that you can send to somebody's house pretty much anywhere in America, and they will draw someone's blood for you with the right paperwork, and then they'll send it to your laboratory.
Dr. Jake Glanville:So that was cool. Then we got the blood in our lab. His story was impressive, but I'm a scientist. I wanted to check his work. And so personally took his blood and spun it to separate out the cells that had the DNA for the antibodies from the serum, that clear liquid that's in your blood when you remove the cells, and that's what has all the antibodies in it.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And I wanted to make sure that his serum actually had antibodies against snake venom. And so I had gone out, and it is much easier than you might think to get ultra lethal snake venom. There are many different providers that can just send it to you. It's one of the interesting things I've discovered in this project. And so I had a panel of cobras, taipans, black mambas, western diamondbacks, and so forth, some of which he had a history of self envenoming with and and some of which that he said he never had self envenomed with.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so I took his serum, and I took my own serum and some control serum and tested them. And sure enough, uniquely, his serum lit up like a Christmas tree, a bunch of antibodies binding to these snake venoms, whereas mine or other people that don't do what Tim does, they had no reactivity. And then critically, the snakes that he said he'd never been exposed to lit up as well. And that got me really excited because that said, Oh, I think that that means that he had done what I had hoped had happened, which was that he had developed these antibodies that recognized those Achilles' heels, which means they didn't just recognize the snakes that he was exposed to, but they recognized all of the other snakes that he hadn't been exposed to, and therefore he likely has the recipe for a universal antivenom in his blood.
Dr.Moira Gunn:You're listening to Tech Nation. I'm Moira Gunn, and my guest today is Jake Glanville. Doctor. Glanville's background includes being a principal scientist and computational biologist with Pfizer, a co founder and CEO of Distributed Bio and a multiple recipient of Gates Foundation grants, one for the grand challenge ending the pandemic threat. You might know him from the Netflix docuseries, pandemic, How to Prevent an Outbreak.
Dr.Moira Gunn:A serial bio entrepreneur, doctor Glanville is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Scentivax. Well, Jake, now you've got all of these antibodies, and I mean a lot. You tell me you built a big library of of Tim's antibodies, and by that, you mean 2,000,000,000 antibodies.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Yeah, so the way the immune system works is that your body produces a tremendous number of different antibodies. Many of these are just lying in wait in case they're ever useful. So when you get infected by any new virus or bacteria or whatnot, somewhere in those hundreds of millions of antibodies, there's one that could be useful to you. The challenge is fishing out the one you care about. When we got the blood from Tim, I had separated out the serum which we tested, and then I had the cells, and they contain all of the DNA that encodes all of those different antibodies.
Dr. Jake Glanville:We took out that DNA, and then we created what's called an antibody library, which was those 2,000,000,000 antibodies from TEMs, and essentially a snapshot of Tim's immune memory of snake bite, but also everything else that he'd been exposed to it through in his whole life. Now we had it stored in chest tubes that we could begin searching through over and over again. We used a technology that won the Nobel Prize in 2018 called phage display to do this. The good news is you've got everything in there. The bad news is that it's the ultimate finding a needle in a haystack.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And the good news is there's technologies to address this. So what you do is you take that library of 2,000,000,000 things, can bind all manner of stuff, and you want to go fish out the one you care about. And the way we did that is that first we took the long neurotoxin that's one of the key toxins in neurotoxic snake venom, and we produced it in our lab, and we added a little tag, a tether, that we could then attach to magnetic beads. And so that way, we have the toxin being displayed off of magnetic beads. And we mix the library with these beads, and then we wash away everything else that doesn't bind.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so only antibodies that bind to the long neurotoxin remain. This is called panning after gold panning. And so at that point, have antibodies, and we chose to start the cobra neurotoxin. So we have all the antibodies in his immune library that recognize the cobra neurotoxin. But I wanted these universal antibodies.
Dr. Jake Glanville:So then what we did next is we took those antibodies, and then we did the same thing but this time with the Taipan neurotoxin. And then we did the same thing but with black mamba neurotoxin, and finally a krait neurotoxin. Each of these is a very different neurotoxic snake, and so by cross selecting, by picking the antibodies not just that bound a neurotoxin but bound all of these four very diverse neurotoxins, we were trying to find these broadly neutralizing universal antibodies. Now, if he didn't have them in his blood, then we would have come up short. There would be nothing left after doing that process.
Dr. Jake Glanville:But what we found was that there was this very potent population of antibodies, and one of them was very dominant, and we named it D9.
Dr.Moira Gunn:D nine? Why D nine?
Dr. Jake Glanville:You call it D nine because there's a you work on these 96 well plates, and there's letters for the for the rows and numbers for the columns. And so that particular clone happened to come out of row d Column nine, and so we called it D nine.
Dr.Moira Gunn:There's no denying it. It had to be D nine. Okay. So now you have to go to animals. What did you do?
Dr. Jake Glanville:We had D9. We knew it bound very large panels of snake venom. We tested against probably 30 or 40 species at the time. And so we wanted to go say, okay. Not only does it bind, but can it protect an animal?
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so what we did is we took the one toxin by itself, and we gave it at a dose that normally would not be survivable for a mouse. In fact, we gave four times the dose where that venom toxin would normally kill the mouse. But we also administered D9. And what we found is with D9, the mice could tolerate it perfectly well. And we really found that for pretty much every long neurotoxin that we assessed.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so that was exciting, but D9 binds to long neurotoxin, and snake venom does not just contain one toxin. It contains multiple different toxins. And so our next step was to ask, I wonder if that one antibody by itself would be enough, against whole venom from some snakes that matter. And so there we at some cobras, we looked at black mamba, and the king cobra, which, fun fact, is actually not a cobra. It's named because it eats cobras.
Dr. Jake Glanville:It's a different genetically distinct group. And those venoms have a lot of long neurotoxin. It just happens to be that their particular cocktail heavily biases towards the long neurotoxin is the dominant reason that that snake will get you. And in those, we were able to give a lethal dose of the full venom from those snakes. And that one antibody by itself was able to protect the animals.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And that, that was pretty astonishing. It, it wasn't true for many of the other snake species, but at least already for six, you could show that the one broadly neutralizing antibody was A, very broad, and b, was able to provide relevant protection, not just against the toxin, but in some venoms against the whole venom and ven envenomation. And that got us extremely excited because it said, we just found a broadly neutralizing antibody. That means that this is no longer a viral phenomenon. This is true for snake venom.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And because we found one of these and because Tim is not dead, that tells me that he probably has more of these broadly neutralizing antibodies in his immune library. And if we keep searching, we could build up a universal antivenom.
Dr.Moira Gunn:Now as can happen in many science stories, suddenly another scientist appears, and it did this time. Enter doctor Peter Kwong. Who is doctor Peter Kwong, and how does he play into this story?
Dr. Jake Glanville:So Peter Kwong is an American scientific luminary, particularly in the area of universal vaccines and broadly neutralizing antibodies. They say in science that you stand on the shoulder of giants to take the next step, and in many respects, the work I was doing was based on standing on the shoulders of Peter Kwong. He had broken open the story of these broadly neutralizing antibodies for HIV, and it demonstrated that they could exist, and therefore that a vaccine for HIV could be plausible, as well as his work on making critical advances for enabling the RSV vaccines and other areas. So I knew of Peter's work, probably it was the case that because of having read his work, I was able to wonder whether snakes could also have broadly neutralizing antibodies in the first place. What happened in 2019 was that I was awarded a Gates Foundation Grand Challenge in the Pandemic Threat Award for my universal flu program.
Dr. Jake Glanville:I was invited to come to the Gates Foundation and attend a dinner. One of the other awardees was Peter Kuang for his program, and we were sitting next to each other. Of course, I'm sitting next to the guy, and so I said, Hey, Peter, would you be interested in hearing about a broadly neutralizing antibody story that is not involving viruses. In fact, it's not even involving a pathogen. It's snake, snakes, and snake bite.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so he was immediately intrigued, fascinated. He's like, okay, we gotta collaborate together. And so he and I began collaborating on advancing the program, which had dramatically accelerated the pace of what we were doing.
Dr.Moira Gunn:And at this point, you thought, Well, we have enough. We must publish. And you went to SELL, the highly regarded peer reviewed journal. And what happened then?
Dr. Jake Glanville:Yeah, so we sent it in to Sell, and we sent it in to an editor to just get their temperature on, Is this something you'd be interested in? And they got back to us and said, Look, this article made my afternoon, it's super fascinating. They said, But, you know, I think you could do more. The article you're describing was a single antibody, and it broadly binds to this one toxin class, but it actually only broadly protects against a limited number of species because most of the other snakes have other toxins that will still kill you. She said, In your discussion, described how this, in theory, would enable you to add more broadly neutralizing antibodies and make an actual broad spectrum cocktail that could work against a vast array of snakes.
Dr. Jake Glanville:She's like, I think you should do that. I think that the cell readers would see that and not just see an idea, but actually see the formation of a product that could change the world. And so Peter and I, you know, we looked at each other and we thought about it, and on one hand, it was a risk, right? Because it was a big lift, and while we were trying to go reach for that big lift, someone else could come along and scoop us, which means publish first, on that one antibody or something like it. But on the other hand, we agreed with the editor.
Dr. Jake Glanville:She was right. That was a much more consequential goal. It was really what our goal was anyway. We were building towards that. And I felt like the risk wasn't that bad because, again, I look over and I'm like, Well, Tim's alive.
Dr. Jake Glanville:That means those antibodies are in there, and so I think we can find them. We took a calculated risk. We said, Let's keep going, and so we kept looking, and we asked, Okay, what's that next next important toxin in there that gets you if the long neurotoxin doesn't? And the second neurotoxic snake toxin is short neurotoxin. In fact, those are the two primary toxins: long neurotoxin and short neurotoxin.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so we fished around, and sure enough, we found a broadly neutralizing antibody that knocked out all short neurotoxins as well. And when we added those two together, then suddenly there was a whole bunch of additional species that were protected. When we were doing this work, we decided, You know, we want to test against a large panel of venomous snakes. And so we went to the World Health Organization and their category one and category two list of the most medically relevant snakes for humans. This is a long list of all the six fifty species of snake.
Dr. Jake Glanville:There are almost 100 that fall into this category. I wanted to pick ones that were geographically diverse, spanning every continent that has snakes, genetically diverse. Those 19 members represented all of the remaining 300 species of neurotoxic snakes, and I wanted them to be the hard ones. I didn't want to pick easy venoms that would be easy to protect against. Wanted to pick the really tough stuff to show off how this could be a breakthrough.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so, we picked this panel and we started testing our cocktail on the panel, and as we added in the short neurotoxin, then suddenly we were hitting a whole bunch of additional snake species. Some snake species where short neurotoxin was actually the dominant toxin, and some snake species where you had to hit both long and short neurotoxin, and only by knocking out both of them together which you have protection. And then finally, we went after this third toxin, which is important for the long neurotoxins. We used a small molecule chemical for that, and when we added that in, then suddenly we had protection spanning the entire set of 19 species, with complete protection for 13 species and partial, which means the animals were living longer and some of them were surviving, but it still wasn't perfect for the remaining six. But that already was an astonishing breakthrough in terms of the breadth of coverage that a an antivenom had ever been able to be demonstrated.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so we returned that over to Cell, and ultimately, was what was published.
Dr.Moira Gunn:So a hundred and twenty five years ago, we got this way of dealing with antivenom, and we've been using it ever since. And now we have another way of dealing with snake bite. What are all the advantages now of being able to do it this way?
Dr. Jake Glanville:Yeah. So a universal antivenom has a number of advantages, particularly a human universal antivenom of a limited number of components. The first and most obvious is that right now, there are six fifty species of snake around the world, venomous snakes. They cause a lot more bites than you might think if you live in The United States or Europe. The world has something like five million bites a year.
Dr. Jake Glanville:About one hundred and forty thousand people die, and then there's three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand that are losing a limb, becoming permanently disabled. And most of those people, they're villagers, they're subsistence agriculturalists, or they're children. There are places where you can't really afford to have a family member that suddenly needs caring for instead of them helping care for the family. So it can be pretty devastating. It's also the case that most of these bites are happening in the developing world, so there's not the same kind of economic incentives for people to go out and make huge amounts of money for these anti venoms.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Finally, the problem is that you need a different anti venom for every different snake, or maybe a set of very similar snakes. And so there's some 30 to 40 products that exist out there, different anti venoms, that treat different local geographies, but most of the snakes have no antivenom. And even for the ones where you have an antivenom, it will probably work better in one area. If you go into the neighboring country, their snakes have evolved enough, they're different enough. Even if it's the same species, it won't work as well.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And then finally, the antivenom's made out of horse serum. And as you could expect, when you are, injected with a whole bunch of horse serum, your immune system's going to freak out. You get an allergic reaction. One is called anaphylaxis, and the other one's called serum sickness. And it's been considered worth it because it's not as bad as the snake venom, which will kill you, but they have to give you a whole bunch of medicines to help manage the pretty tremendous side effects of your body being like, What are all these antibodies that are not human suddenly in my veins?
Dr. Jake Glanville:So universal human antivenom solves all of that. So instead of the current problem, as to breadth, where someone gets bit, imagine that you are in a village and you got bit. Your experience is you're going to have to hike or be taken back to a place where someone can give you an IV. And in some cases, that could be four hours before you get there. It needs to be a place that has refrigeration, because the antivenoms have to be administered through intravenous infusion, IVs.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And the bigger problem is that you show up and they go, Oh, I'm sorry you were bit. Did you happen to have the presence of mind while you were being bit by an ultra venomous snake to go wrestle around the grass and find the snake and put it in a doggy bag for us, or at least take a picture so that we know what species bit you so that we can check if we happen to have in stock any non expired antivenom, even if even exists for that particular class of snake. Obviously, that's not always satisfied. So a lot of times, people don't get any antivenom. And then if they get it, they have to treat all the side effects.
Dr. Jake Glanville:A universal antivenom gets rid of all that. You go in. No matter what you've been bit with, they can give you the same product. That actually solves a global macroeconomic issue as well because it unfractures a market where suddenly, instead of 30 to 40 products, you're creating one product to service all snakes. And suddenly that becomes more economically viable to produce that product year after year.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Look, this is never going to be the same value as a blockbuster cancer drug that first world people will pay huge amounts of money for. But it's a very large number of people, and you can make it profitable, and that means it can be sustainable and solve some of the problems of pharmaceutical companies divesting and working on antivenom. So the second thing, in addition to it working on all snakes, is that because it's human antibodies and just a couple of them, that gives you certain types of advantages for the product profile, so how this can actually be deployed. Current antivenom is made from horse or other similar animal sera, and there could be 10,000 or more antibodies in there. And each antibody has a different preference for how it likes to be, freeze dried or concentrated.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And unfortunately, that means it's really hard to go freeze dry or concentrate this sera from horses because a lot of the antibodies are going to fall apart when you try to resuspend them. And that means that you can't do that, and so people use intravenous infusion, IV bags, and that means you need to have them at a hospital that has refrigeration and has a doctor who can give an IV things that we take for granted in The United States but typically not true in many of the areas where people are actually needing treatment for snake bite. And that means you have to travel for four hours to get to the hospital. When you suddenly only have a couple human antibodies, then you can find a set of conditions that you can freeze dry these things it's called lyophilization where they can all be freeze dried and then they can be resuspended. That opens up a new powerful product that's kind of like an EpiPen for antivenom, which is you have the freeze dried product that no longer requires refrigeration.
Dr. Jake Glanville:You have the excipient, which is the saline plus maybe some sugars, and that could exist in a dual chambered syringe. So that means that could be deployed out in the villages, it could be deployed in a backpack of a warfighter, and when there's a problem, you just twist, the liquid resuspends, and then it can be injected intramuscular. And then the last obvious advantage is that these are human antibodies. Body is while it's not been evolved to tolerate a whole bunch of horse antibodies loaded in at once, it's perfectly happy having very high doses of human antibodies. They are actually the biologics class of the most popular and well established drugs precisely because your body's evolved to tolerate a large amount of human antibody, which means you could dose it safely closer to where the person was bit without having to have all these accessory support functions at a hospital to deal with the anaphylaxis and the serum sickness.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And so pretty much across every axis, it creates a superior product that can be deployed closer to the time of bite, which matters, because the longer you wait after a bite, the more irreversible damage you're going to suffer and the more likely you are to die. It allows you to just have the same product for every snake, and it allows that product to be administered quickly without knowing what type of snake bit you, which means more people are gonna get antivenom and that more people are gonna get treated. And so these were all major advantages and part of why we've been pushing on this.
Dr.Moira Gunn:Okay. What about Tim? What's happened to Tim?
Dr. Jake Glanville:So one of the things that I felt was really important here In bioscience, sometimes you find amazing molecules or an amazing biospecimen from a human. And that's cool. Sam's not the first. There are others where this has been the case. But in general, biotechnology has struggled with powerful specimens drawn from a human, and that human deriving no benefit of their use.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Other people receive a benefit. The classic example was Henrietta Lacks in the HeLa cells that are used now in laboratories all over the world, and she and her family were frustrated that she didn't receive any benefit for it. I was wanting to make sure that not just that we had a good ethical design for the studies, but that we recognized in an ethical manner the appropriate amount of time that Tim spent on this, which was really, this is his life's work, eighteen years. And so, Tim, been hired by us as the director of herpetology. He has equity in the company, and then he and I have a special agreement that if there's any particular bonuses or benefits that come out of the anti venom program, whatever they are, he and I are sort of locked step to receive equal.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And that was to recognize his 18 of research and development in his bloodstream to create these molecules. We're lucky to have him. He has an astonishing autodidact knowledge of all things snake, all things snake bite, all things venom, and so he participates with us in electing the additional toxins to go after, looking at veterinary and clinical networks to be able to proceed against. And then he's communicated with pretty much everyone in the anti virulent world. He's also our major networker.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Those are the various things he does with us at the company. I'm very fortunate to work with someone like Tim.
Dr.Moira Gunn:Well, it's two decades of his life. And when you think what he did and he was out there pretty much alone doing this. It has to be hard on a life.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Yeah. And it was. Not just the pain. He made this his life's focus. When I first talked to him, he told me about all these bites and so forth.
Dr. Jake Glanville:To give you a sense of how obsessed and dedicated he was to this, he told me he had notes. And I said, Okay. I wasn't sure what to expect. And when he sends them to me, I was completely blown away. It was this meticulous record that spanned seventeen years and nine months, where every single time he self envenomed, he recorded the species, the microgram, and slowly escalated up to milligrams of of dry weight, the site of immunization.
Dr. Jake Glanville:He took a diameter of swelling, so he monitored the amount of swelling. He had a self reported pain score and some pretty rowdy notes. And he did this the entire time. That's how I know he had six fifty four bites and 200 two zero two bites and six fifty four self immunizations. It's how I was able to monitor his process.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Even in that data, you could read at what you could tell at what point he had developed immunity because the swelling started dropping, even if the doses increased. And so that gave me a little snapshot into how much this had become an all consuming obsession for him. And that obviously had consequences in his life. The man had boxes upon boxes of snakes in his basement. It had been converted to a vivarium.
Dr. Jake Glanville:He was spending all his time on this, and, you know, eventually, his his wife had had left him. They got divorced, and his child had become estranged, he hadn't seen him in a while. It was honestly the nobody expected the amount of press that we got out of the publication of the Sell article. It was gratifying, but I think my favorite part about all of it was that Tim called me one day, and he said his son, who had been estranged, had called him and said, Dad, I finally understand what you were doing all that time. I'm proud of you.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And I just felt like that redemption arc meant made the whole thing worth it.
Dr.Moira Gunn:Wow. Big story on many levels. Jake, of course, I wanna thank you so much for coming in. I also wanna thank you because as I went through the other media coverage, I got to see pictures of sentivac research scientists, including my former students, Joel Andre, Hannah Hero, and Mark Bellin. My students are the best as you know.
Dr.Moira Gunn:And they are. There they are in in the coverage. And I wanna thank you for just showing us how science gets made, how exciting how exciting it is, and how you gotta take risks and a tremendous human story all around.
Dr. Jake Glanville:Well, just wanna, first off, thank you for having me on. Second, I wanna thank you for what you've done with the USF program. You know, Mark is my co author on the paper. Joel and Hannah have been tremendous. Like, we we are able to do these kinds of projects because of the remarkable training that the folks get at the University of San Francisco Biotechnology program, and, we're lucky to have them.
Dr. Jake Glanville:So thank you for all that you've done there. And and, again, thank thank you for, taking the time to share this story. I'm I'm, excited on where we're going next. We have the half of the cocktail. We're working to finish the other half for the vipers.
Dr. Jake Glanville:And I I think we're gonna have something that could have lasting value for the next century to come, and and that that that's gratifying.
Dr.Moira Gunn:My guest today is doctor Jacob Glanville, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Centivax. More information is available on the web at centivax.com. That's centivax. Centivax.com.
