Venom and Ozempic is a story I found fascinating. It seems that far more medical discoveries are coming from the natural world than we ever thought possible. Nature has been at the process of survival, attack and defence, for far longer than we, humans, have, so it stands to reason she is far better at it than we are. All we need is the humility to accept that and, where feasible, to use it.
Jean-Pierre Raufman was a recent graduate, aged 29, when he arrived at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in 1980. He had been offered the chance to do research at the Digestive Diseases Branch, but no-one had really thought through exactly what he was going to do. Working in the same building was another researcher, John Pisano, who had an unusual obsession; his main area of interest was venom. About 200,000 venomous animals – amphibians, reptiles, insects, even mammals – exist on Earth, at least as far as we know. There are almost certainly many more that we haven’t discovered yet. Over millions of years, their toxins have evolved to dodge and duck the defense mechanisms of immune systems, becoming a perfect killing machine.
Scientists have realized that, in terms of the human body, these toxins are an ideal template for the development of drugs. Not only are venomous toxins resilient, but you can tweak the composition of the amino acids that make up the toxins, and design a non-lethal, venom-based, medical treatment.
Raufman and Pisano hit it off immediately, and they began to cooperate scientifically. Raufman’s first use of Pisano’s venoms did not exactly go to plan. When he added the venoms to some amino acids, the venoms totally destroyed them. This happened with venom after venom until he tried venom from the Gila Monster, a lizard that is native to the South-West United States. Three years of further work led Raufman to conclude he had something very interesting on his hands. However, he then moved on to another job, and his research just lay dormant for the rest of the 1980’s. I should add that Raufman’s work was pure research, with no idea or aim at producing something useful in medical science.
Early in the 1990’s, a series of coincidences and meetings resulted in Raufman’s original research being resurrected by others. Working in collaboration with Rosalyn Yarrow, who ran a laboratory at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs hospital in the Bronx, New York, the experiments used the Gila Monster venom, combined with peptides that occur in the human stomach. The results, tested with diabetic mice, showed an amazing (the researchers’ words) reduction in blood glucose.
Raufman had used his own money to patent his discovery and then tried to get pharmaceutical companies interested. It proved to be a frustrating exercise that produced little or no interest.
When the results obtained in the 1990’s experiments became known, interest took off and Amylin Pharmaceuticals obtained Kaufman’s patents, which he had left in the public domain. In 2002, Eli Lilly entered into a partnership with Amylin Pharmaceuticals for the rights to the process Raufman had pioneered. Three years and $328 million later, the result was Byetta, which was the forerunner of Ozempic.
Raufman never lived to see the results of his discovery. He died of a heart attack in 1985.
In the current political environment, there is a total de-emphasis on research, with funding being used as a weapon by the Trump administration against the U.S. university system where most basic research is conducted. That destructive initiative of Trump has only been exacerbated by the certifiable idiot in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. Medical research has been curtailed, misinterpreted and ignored.
Perhaps this article I read about Jean-Pierre Raufman can serve as a beacon of what we are potentially losing by the Trump Administration’s suppressing, twisting and ignoring basic research and, in particular, medical research, in some indefensible attempt to project their bizarre visions on all of us.
