Dear Colleagues,

Snakes and snake venom diversity has been very well studied for many species. However, the detailed mechanism of action of snake envenomation is still not known. Snake venoms contain a diverse and extensive variety of toxins used to capture and immobilize their prey. As such, these toxins are used to cause severe localized damage, such as through cell necrosis, hemolysis, edema, and inflammation, leading to hemorrhage, coagulopathy, and eventually death. Snake venoms and their isolated toxins as a pharmacological source have enormous biomedical potential for treating heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. The global exploration of snake venom and understanding the pathophysiology of snakebites require the use of omics approaches to characterize snake venom and these omic approaches offer insights into the venom proteome, although further investigation is needed as many of these snake venoms have not been characterized. With 5.4 million snakebites worldwide per year, snake envenomation is a serious health concern affecting 1.8-2.7 million people, causing 81,000-138,000 deaths, and leading >400,000 cases of chronic disabilities such as amputations as well as post-traumatic stress. As the only current therapy to counteract envenoming, which is a 100-year-old practice, antivenoms are produced by immunization of large domestic animals (horses and sheep) and consequently have profound limitations, including low antivenom titer, narrow spectrum, adverse reaction, rapid clearance, low efficacy, high cost, and batch-to-batch variability. Herein, this Special Issue of Toxins is specifically focused on publishing recent research activities exploring snake venom and the development of antivenom serum. Toxins is an outstanding forum for venom research due to its notable reputation on snake venom and broader toxicology interest. We strongly believe that the articles published will be of great interest to evolutionary biologists studying snake toxins, as well as immunologists, biotechnologists, and pharmacologists working in developing next generation therapeutics.

Dr. Jacob Galan
Guest Editor

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• snake venom metalloproteinase (svMP)
• hemorrhage
• coagulopathy
• inhibitory antibody
• synthetic library
• toxicity score
• venomics
• proteomics
• next-generation antivenom