Snake venoms have not revealed all their secrets
Wednesday, March 23, 2011 - 11:02
in Biology & Nature
For several decades, snake venoms have been used in pharmacology to make new drugs. But a French team of pharmacologists, clinicians, systematists and conservation biologists, headed by Nicolas Vidal of the Laboratory Systématique, Adaptation, Evolution," have shown that such venoms are largely under-exploited. They decided to pool their efforts to make full use of these resources in pharmaceutical compounds and to safeguard threatened species. The results of this study are published this week in the journal Bioessays.