Venom from Australia’s deadliest spider, the funnel web, could lead to a world-first treatment for brain damage caused by stroke, according to a new study.
On Tuesday, researchers from the University of Queensland and Monash University announced that a newly-discovered protein, found in the toxic venom of the spider, was seen to prevent damage to brain cells after stroke in lab rats.
The protein they discovered is called Hi1a and surprisingly, it’s completely harmless.
“We believe that we have, for the first time, found a way to minimise the effects of brain damage after a stroke,” Professor Glenn King, from the UQ Institute for Molecular Bioscience told the AAP.
“This world-first discovery will help us provide better outcomes for stroke survivors by limiting the brain damage and disability caused by this devastating injury,” he added.
The experiment called for the capture of three deadly funnel web spiders – whose bite can kill a human being in just 15 minutes – from Fraser Island on the Queensland coast.
The spiders were then “milked exhaustively” so that scientists could synthetically recreate the protein and inject it into rats.
The small protein, Hi1a, was found to block ion channels in the brain which play an important role in brain damage after strokes.
The scientists milked the spiders by administering an electric charge to their fangs, which causes the muscles to contract and the venom to spill out.
In the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor King explained that a dose of the protein two hours after the stroke was observed to reduce the brain damage in rats by 80%.
And when administered a whopping eight hours after the attack, the protein still cut down damage to the brain by around 65%.
The finding was stumbled upon accidentally, as scientists originally sought to sequence the DNA of the venom.
