The king baboon tarantula (Pelinobius muticus) has been considered a tarantula you don’t want to mess with – at all, even if you love tarantulas. And for the rest of the population, you might even disdain this spider for the danger it might pose to you. This is due to the nasty bite and venom this tarantula packs, however it might be far more useful than we know – because it’s being studied as a possible painkiller.

Now, tarantula bites can CAUSE pain, however according to a new study, this king baboon spider might actually unlock mysteries of chronic pain.  Findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that tarantula venom might resolve some questions that have plagued the medical field for years and years.

It turns out that venom of the king baboon spider is particularly good at hijacking the electric processes that tell our neurons – particularly the ones that control our sensation of pain – whether to fire or relax. And when these neurons cannot relax and only fire, this turns into chronic pain. King Baboon venom has many properties – one of which is a peptide called Pm1a that causes the neurons to fire and cause pain. However, venoms also have peptides that prevent pain as those peptides are “selective” for a specific chronic pain channel (Nav1.7). The venom of this tarantula has helped scientists and researchers understand how the human body processes pain – so that we can learn better ways to treat it in the future.

The advantage of using spider venom, according to  Christina Schroeder, a researcher at NIH, is that “The benefit of using spider-derived venom peptides are that these peptides do not cause dose dependence and addiction.” She also added that because they don’t rely on the receptors that oxycodone or morphine would latch onto, and can also be more precise than opioids, there can be less side effects. This also decreases the risk of addiction and having to always increase the dose of opioid due to becoming desensitized.

The interesting thing about king baboon tarantula venom is that the venom is NOT selective, it hits lots of ion channels. Rocio Finol-Urdaneta, a co-author of the study who conducts research at the Illawarra Health and Medical Research Institute in Australia called the king baboon’s venom peptide “promiscuous” and because it impacts different channels at the same time, an individual neuron may not be as likely to become desensitized like it would with an opioid. Sean Mackey, chief of pain medicine at Stanford University, said: “Imagine if you engineer a different peptide that does just the opposite, blocking sodium channels and opening potassium channels. Now you’ve got an analgesic that is promiscuous and operating in a much different way than any of our current drugs.”

Schroeder reported that this would make king baboon venom a very effective painkiller and that we should be focusing more of our attention on painkillers that target several channels of our pain-sensing systems:

“This study highlights that we should probably reexamine the way we approach the development of novel pain therapeutics”

Thanks to the king baboon’s venom peptides, researchers have determined what this peptide does. They will now be studying how it works on a molecular level, and may try to figute out if this process can be reverse-engineered so that instead of pain, there is pain relief.