Costa Rica Keeps Deadly Vipers on Purpose, and Their Venom Is Where Medicine Learned What a Peptide Must Prove Before It Becomes a Drug

About 20 kilometers north of San José, a university laboratory keeps hundreds of venomous snakes on purpose. The snakes are not the product. Their venom is the raw material for antivenom, and, as a side effect, for one of the clearest lessons in how a molecule becomes a medicine. Most molecules never make it. The ones that do get redesigned, tested and documented until the animal they came from is almost beside the point. The lab that keeps vipers on purpose The Instituto Clodomiro Picado was established in 1970 as a research unit of the Universidad de Costa Rica. It carries the name of Clodomiro Picado Twight, the scientist who in the 1920s set out to study snakebite as a public health problem. Costa Rica made its first lot of antivenom in 1967, through a joint effort of the university, the Ministry of Health and a US military mission, and the institute followed three years later. The reason is local.

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