English-Better Than Its Bite

• Australia is home to the world’s ten most deadly snakes. A bite from any one of them can kill you, but some day their venom may be saving lives.

• Promising cancer research using snake venoms has led sentists at the University of Sourth Australia to wander why no one had previously turned their attention to the venom of Australia snakes, especially since they are known to contain s complex mixture of elements.

• Now Associate Professor Woods and colleagues have identified a compound found in the venom of these snakes that may stop the grouth of malignat tumors. Woods explain that venom are living tissue and need a blood supply to fuel growth. To grow,venoms develop specialized blood vessels.Many cutting-edge cancer treatments attemp to starve the tumour of this blood supply, thereby arresting growth. The downside however, of current therapies such as chemothreapy is that heathy cells are affected as well. But not so with Australia snake venom. Woods discovered that, used at extremely low doses, the venomous compound kills the cell that line blood vessels in tumors, but not heathy cells.

• Scentists beleves that the ability to use the toxin at such a low dose makes it promising as a cancer treatment. However, more research is needed before it can be tested in hunmans.

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vessels,downside,therapy,cutting-edge,toxing,extremely,
treatment,identify.