Opinion: The growing fang-to-pharmacy pipeline

OpinionFirst Opinion The growing fang-to-pharmacy pipeline Venom helped give us GLP-1 weight loss drugs. What’s next? Manage alerts for this article Email this article Share this article By Steve MidwayJuly 16, 2026 Midway is an associate professor at Louisiana State University. After a deep breath, the auto-injector pen dumps its dose into a patch of pinched stomach with barely a sting. For many, it has become a mindless nonevent. The hormone collects in a bolus in fat tissue, where it binds to albumin and, over several days, trickles into the bloodstream to do its work. Weight loss and blood sugar control were promised, yet the benefits are still surprising doctors and patients. We are in our peptides era, and this feels like just the beginning. This all started with a venomous lizard from the Desert Southwest. Advertisement Most people don’t think much about venoms, or they have a negative impression of them. Venoms are highly concentrated death and destruction: 1 mg of venom from Australia’s inland taipan (snake) — the equivalent of one grain of table salt — can kill a human. The unrealized pain and suffering bound up in venom molecules is real, but to a growing number of scientists and pharmaceutical companies, they represent something else entirely: a hidden medicine cabinet. Nature is a chemist. For more than 100 million years, evolution has fine-tuned venoms in snakes, lizards, fish, scorpions, and a cornucopia of other creatures into tactical weapons. Each venom is a unique cocktail of peptides and proteins that can cause muscular paralysis, tissue destruction, cardiac arrest, or other effects. What we’ve seen in recent decades, however, is a growing pipeline from venom to pharmacy. Scientists are cracking the code for extracting useful molecules from substances designed to harm. Venom isn’t a single substance. One venomous species may produce hundreds of distinct molecules, each assigned to different biological dirty work. Scientists physically extract venom from a living animal, then use routine lab techniques to separate the sample into individual components, in a process known as fractionation. It’s a bit like disassembling a Swiss watch: What looks like one mechanism turns out to be dozens of tiny, precision-engineered gears, each doing a rotating one small piece in the service of giving you the time. The goal is to isolate each part and figure out what it does.Advertisement Once the components are classified, researchers start looking. Sometimes there is a strong lead: They know a particular venom crashes blood pressure, so they test its fractions against a specific biological target. Other times, the search is more speculative. When a promising molecule surfaces, scientists must decode its exact mechanism (which receptor it binds to, which pathway it activates or blocks) and then modify the raw peptide to make it stable enough for human use. We want it to gently lower blood pressure, not induce hypovolemic shock. With nature’s molecule at the core, the drug candidate then faces the same gauntlet of clinical trials as any other, a process that often spans a decade or more. The success stories may be circulating in your body. One of the most widely prescribed drugs in history is an ACE inhibitor called captopril. In 1965, a young Brazilian pharmacologist named Sérgio Henrique Ferreira was studying the venom of Bothrops jararaca, a Brazilian pit viper. Ferreira found that peptides in the venom powerfully inhibited an enzyme involved in regulating blood pressure. The venom’s ability to cause a life-threatening drop in blood pressure (the very thing that made the snake lethal), if harnessed, could help to manage blood pressure. Scientists at Bristol Myers Squibb used Ferreira’s peptide to synthesize captopril, the first oral ACE inhibitor, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1981. Many improved derivatives have followed, which comprise a large part of the ACE inhibitors available today. Globally, these drugs are a go-to treatment for hypertension and heart failure, and they all trace back to one snake in the Brazilian rainforest. Ziconotide is another example. It is a synthetic version of a peptide derived from the venom of a cone snail. Ziconotide treats severe chronic pain with a distinct advantage: It is not an opioid, making it a refuge for patients with few other options. But perhaps venom’s most consequential gift hangs in the frothy saliva of the Gila monster. A peptide called exendin-4 became exenatide, the founding molecule behind the entire GLP-1 class of drugs. That lineage now includes Ozempic, Mounjaro, and a growing roster of treatments that have not only changed the lives of patients with diabetes and obesity but also ushered in the cultural phenomenon of peptides.Advertisement The fang-to-pharmacy pipeline promises more and interesting products. The deathstalker scorpion’s venom includes chlorotoxin, a peptide with a remarkable property: It binds selectively to the surface of brain tumor cells but largely ignores healthy tissue. Researchers at Blaze Bioscience have conjugated chlorotoxin with a near-infrared fluorescent dye to create tozuleristide, now called “tumor paint.” When injected before surgery, it causes cancer cells to glow under a specialized camera, so that neurosurgeons can see exactly what to remove and what to leave behind. The drug has completed four Phase 1 trials in adults with brain, breast, and skin cancers and received FDA Fast Track designation for pediatric central nervous system tumors. If approved, a scorpion’s venom could become commonplace in the operating room. Every time a species disappears, we may be losing a medicine that could save human lives, or at least improve the living. One reclusive rainforest pit viper gave us ACE inhibitors. Yet who among us would have rallied to save that snake before we knew what it carried? How many cures have already vanished before we thought to look? We’ve all heard the appalling statistics: 18 soccer fields of tropical forest are lost every minute, freshwater organisms are declining by 85%, and insect populations have been cut by almost half over the last 40 years. With roughly half of all FDA-approved drugs derived from nature, how many human lives are lost or unimproved when would-be medicines go extinct? Evolution has done most of the hard work for us. The peptides in venom were not assembled at random. They have been refined over millions of years to interact with precise biological targets. A chemist starting from scratch might spend a career just to create the venom, let alone the subsequent drug. Yet some of the most powerful medicines we will ever find are already here, carried in the fangs, stingers, and saliva of creatures we’ve long been taught to fear.Advertisement The question is whether those creatures will still be around when we finally think to ask. Steve Midway is a professor at Louisiana State University. Letter to the editor Have an opinion on this essay? 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