Our sick hearts may one day owe a venomous spider a debt of gratitude. Scientists in Australia are about to begin clinical trials of a heart disease drug originally based on the venom of the K’gari funnel web spider.
Although there are now several classes of drugs that can prevent or treat heart problems, heart disease remains one of the leading causes of death. So any new treatments that can protect our heart are still important. Researchers at the University of Queensland and elsewhere think they have found such a candidate first isolated from a venomous species of spider found on Australia’s K’gari Island (then known as Fraser Island): a protein called Hi1a.
These spiders are thought to have the most dangerous and complex venom ever found in spiders, but only a few of the 3,000 proteins in their venom are considered completely lethal to humans, while others such as Hi1a may have practical applications. The team’s previous research in animals found evidence that Hi1a can protect the heart when it is deprived of oxygen during a heart attack. It appears to do so by blocking the signals that cause heart cells to shut down when there is no oxygen around. That same feature can also be used to improve the survival of donor hearts during organ procurement.
After receiving major funding from the Australian government in the Medical Research Future Fund, researchers are now ready to begin clinical trials of Hi1a in heart disease and heart donation, which is expected to last four years.
“This MRFF grant will enable us to conduct human clinical trials to test a truncated version of Hi1a as a drug to treat heart disease and protect donor hearts during recovery,” said Glenn King, a researcher at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Biology. Bioscience, in a statement from the university. “If successful, it will improve patient survival and quality of life, significantly increase the pool of donor hearts available for transplant, and significantly reduce health care costs.”“
Many promising drugs have failed to live up to their potential in human trials, either because they don’t work as well as people had hoped or because they aren’t as safe and tolerable as previous studies suggested they might be. So it will take time to know if Hi1a is the real deal. But researchers are generally optimistic about the future of finding new treatments for animal pain, a field known as venomics. Just last year, for example, scientists in Brazil began a Phase II human trial to test their spider mite-based drug as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. King and his team also hope that Hi1a can be used to treat strokes and certain types of epilepsy.
So while spider venom may not give anyone superpowers, it may be a rich source of novel and valuable drugs.
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