Creepy Cure: Deadly Spider Venom Tapped for Heart Attack Drug

Our ailing hearts might someday owe a debt of gratitude to a venomous spider. Scientists in Australia are about to begin a clinical trial for a heart attack medication that was originally derived from the venom of the K’gari funnel web spider.

While there are now several classes of drugs that can prevent or treat heart issues, cardiovascular disease remains the single largest leading cause of death. So any new treatments that can safeguard our heart are still worthwhile. Researchers at the University of Queensland and elsewhere think they’ve landed upon such a candidate that was first isolated from a venomous species of funnel spider found on Australia’s K’gari island (formerly known as Fraser Island): a protein called Hi1a.

These spiders are thought to have some of the deadliest and most complex venom ever found in spiders, but only a handful of the 3,000 proteins in their venom are considered outright lethal to humans, while others like Hi1a could have practical applications. The team’s earlier research in animals has found evidence that Hi1a can protect the heart when it’s being deprived of oxygen during a heart attack. It appears to do so by preventing the signals that cause heart cells to effectively self-terminate when there’s no oxygen around. That same attribute could also be used to improve the survivability of donor hearts during organ retrieval.

After having obtained substantial funding from the Australian government’s Medical Research Future Fund, the researchers are now ready to start a clinical trial of Hi1a for heart attacks and heart donation, which is expected to run for four years.

“This MRFF funding will enable us to undertake human clinical trials to test a miniaturized version of Hi1a as a drug to treat heart attack and protect donor hearts during the retrieval process,” said Glenn King, a researcher at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience, in a statement from the university. “If successful, it will improve patient survival and quality of life, dramatically expand the pool of donor hearts available for transplantation, and significantly reduce healthcare costs.”

Many promising drug candidates have failed to live up to their potential in human trials, either because they’re not as effective as hoped in people or because they’re not as safe and tolerable as earlier studies suggested they would be. So it will take time to know whether Hi1a is the real deal. But researchers are generally hopeful about the future of deriving new treatments from the venom of animals, a field known as venomics. Just last year, for instance, scientists in Brazil began a Phase II human trial testing their spider venom-derived drug as a treatment for erection dysfunction. King and his team also are hoping that Hi1a could be used to treat strokes and certain forms of epilepsy.

So while spider venom might not give anyone superpowers, it could turn out to be a rich source of novel and important medicines.