Question: Can medicines be made out of venoms?

Katherine Jones answered on 21 Jun 2011:

This is a great question! The answer is yes – in a way. When we are going to make a new medicine, we make compounds with different chemical structures and see how well they work. But we have to start from somewhere, and one place we get our ideas from is nature.

The best example of this I can think of are medicines called ACE inhibitors. These are medicines that treat high blood pressure, and originally came from snake venoms! Of course, we don’t want to have the same effect as the snake venom, so scientists have made some small changes to the chemical structures to keep the good effects and remove the bad ones.