As tarantula owners, we know and love all parts of our spiders: even tarantula venom! And while the rest of the world may be terrified, it turns out that they may want to change their minds after this. Tarantulas and their venom is actually being used tons in the medical field right now and has some pretty wild applications. This will be good to tell your arachnophobic friends or anyone who doesn’t believe tarantulas are valuable!

Tarantula venom has quite a profound use in the medical field. It’s been studied and used in developments related to pain killers and chronic pain, muscular dystrophy, and medicine!

Tarantula toxins in venom may be powerful painkillers

Due to the terribly addictive affects of opioids, scientists are trying to find better ways to deal with chronic pain. In the last few years, individual peptide toxins in tarantula venom is being tapped to target receptors in the brain to potentially serve as painkillers that are safer and more effective for pain management. As 100 million Americans are suffering with chronic pain, this could have big implications. Via Sciencedaily:

Millions of people live with chronic and neuropathic pain, in large part because current treatments often provide limited pain relief, have a heavy profile of soporific side effects and can be extremely addictive. So researchers around the globe are chasing down potential new therapeutic agents and working to gain a better understanding of how molecules with painkiller activity function. This will lead to alternative painkillers–and possibly improve the quality of life for people who suffer from chronic pain.

At the Biophysical Society’s 60th Annual Meeting, being held in Los Angeles, Calif., Feb. 27-March 2, 2016, a group of researchers from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, will describe their efforts with ProTx-II, a peptide toxin found within the venom of the Peruvian green velvet tarantula, Thrixopelma pruriens. Its high potency and selectivity to inhibit the pain sensation receptor make it an ideal candidate as a future painkiller.

It works like this: “It binds to the pain receptor located within the membrane of neuronal cells, but the precise peptide-receptor binding site and the importance of the cell membrane in the inhibitory activity of ProTx-II is unknown.”

Along the same vein, tarantula venom is doing important work for pain research. Wire.com reported:  

But venoms are especially useful for pain research because they’re filled with hundreds of toxins designed to bork nervous systems of all kinds, combined and honed over millions of years. Many of those toxins are knotted strings of amino acids that nestle into some specific nook of a pain receptor—a terrible case of things fitting perfectly into other things, but useful for pinpointing locations on nerve cells that feel certain types of pain.

Dr. Julie Kaae Klint of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience said:

“Untapping this natural source of new medicines brings a distinct hope of accelerating the development of a new class of painkillers that can help people who suffer from chronic pain that cannot be treated with current treatment options.”

Muscular dystrophy

It’s also been found that the venom of the Chilean rose hair tarantula has a protein called M-TRTX-Gr1a that could help treat muscular dystrophy by preventing or slowing down the deterioration of muscles.

Muscular dystrophy primarly affects young boys, so this could save so many children. Frederick Sachs, a professor of physiology and biophysics, purchased a chilean rose hair tarantula called Rosie as a laboratory pet some 20 years ago, and she aided researchers in learning how they might be able to use venom to suppress diseases such as muscular dystrophy because the venom has  a protein that kept the ion channels that impact muscular dystrophy shut.

Why isn’t this major news? It’s interesting. Here’s what happened when Sachs and his scientists published their findings:

Sachs called pharmaceutical companies to see if any were interested in developing the protein into a drug. Several firms invited him to present his research group’s work. Years passed, however, and none of the businesses followed through with funding.

Now that’s sad!!!

Livescience.com also reported that researches say that spider venom may lead to treatments for cardiac arrhythmias, spinal cord damage and other conditions such as erectile disfunction.

Questions about how tarantula venom is extracted for medical purposes? Here’s a great video about this:

As you can see, tarantula venom saves lives and it’s very exciting to think what we might find when more funding and research is being allocated for these studies!