Venom, Evolution, and the Race to Save Lives

An Indian Scientist’s Journey

India’s daily headlines often miss a silent emergency: venomous snakebites claim over 58,000 lives here every year, with countless more left permanently disabled. My work sits at the crossroads of ecology, evolution, and molecular genetics, trying to understand venom and transform treatment. I’m an evolutionary biologist and Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, where I founded the Evolutionary Venomics Lab—India’s first dedicated to the ecological and evolutionary study of animal venoms.

From Art to Attenborough: How Curiosity Found Its Course

I grew up in Dharwad, Karnataka, in a home full of art, ideas, and curiosity. My parents—artists and educators—nurtured my fascination with the natural world. My father’s wildlife documentaries and weekend excursions shaped my earliest encounters with nature. Like many students in India, I initially assumed success meant medicine or engineering. After a disappointing board exam, I entered Karnatak Science College as a “Plan B.” One class changed my life. Molecular genetics—how genes, selection, and time sculpt nature’s diversity—made my path suddenly, unmistakably clear.

The Road to Venom: Falling in Love with Snakes

As my studies advanced, so did my fascination with reptiles, sharpened by the storytelling of Sir David Attenborough and Romulus Whitaker. I still remember an eyelash pit viper plucking a hummingbird mid-air—beauty and danger fused in a split second. Venom became my scientific muse. I devoured research, especially by Dr Bryan Fry (“the venom doc”), and set my sights on a PhD that would unravel how ordinary body proteins are recruited and refined by evolution into complex, potent toxins.

When I couldn’t find a home in India for the evolutionary study of venom, I built one abroad. I wrote to Dr Agostinho Antunes at the University of Porto, persuaded him to back an animal-venom project, and secured a fellowship. During my PhD, I investigated venom across the animal kingdom—from snakes to scorpions, spiders to centipedes, cone snails to octopuses, and even venomous mammals. Collaborations with childhood heroes followed. Postdoctoral work across Australia, Europe, and Israel expanded my toolkit: from population genetics to genome editing. In one striking project with Prof. Yehu Moran, we engineered sea anemones so their stinging cells glowed—letting us isolate and study those cells through development and evolution.

Coming Home to Build a First-of-Its-Kind Lab

I always planned to return to India. With the Ramanujan Fellowship and INSPIRE Faculty Award, I joined IISc in August 2017 and founded the Evolutionary Venomics Lab (www.venomicslab.com). Our mission is ambitious: map venom diversity across geographies and species, understand how ecology and environment shape venom composition, and translate those insights into next-generation therapies.

Fieldwork at the Edge of the Map

My work begins far from the bench. My team and I travel across India—the Western Ghats, the Northeast, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the deserts of Rajasthan, the Deccan Plateau, and the Gangetic Plains—collecting venoms from wild-caught animals with permissions and close coordination with Forest Departments. We transport venom samples at subzero temperatures and interrogate them through biochemistry, proteomics, transcriptomics, genomics, and immunology. Meanwhile, our computational analyses simulate evolutionary change across deep time, tracing how natural selection tunes venom to prey and place.

What My Research Is Revealing

• Venom emerges from everyday proteins. Ordinary physiological proteins—some found in all of us—are recruited, duplicated, and refined by evolution into toxins with precise targets.

• Geography and diet matter. The same species can wield different venoms across regions. Prey type and ecological context push venom composition in distinct directions.

• India’s most toxic snake. We identified the Sind Krait (Bungarus sindanus) as India’s most toxic snake. Just 0.02 mg of its venom can kill a large number of mice—an astonishing measure of evolutionary efficiency.

• Convergent resilience. Across hundreds of millions of years, distantly related animals—from insects to reptiles to mammals—have evolved identical molecular strategies to resist deadly plant and toad toxins. Evolution often converges on the same trick when it works.

  
  

Why Antivenom Needs a Revolution

India is the global epicenter of snakebite mortality. Yet conventional antivenom production still relies on a century-old method: injecting diluted venom into horses and harvesting antibodies. Most Indian antivenoms target the “big four” snakes. They often struggle against bites from other medically important species and even against geographically distinct populations of the same species, whose venoms can differ markedly. The result is inconsistent—and sometimes alarmingly ineffective—treatment.

My long-term goal is clear: move beyond horses to recombinant DNA-enabled antivenoms that are more targeted, scalable, and broadly effective. By blending evolutionary insight with modern immunology and genetics, we aim to build therapies that match the true diversity of venom across India. There have been success stories from this already! In collaboration with Dr. Joseph Jardine at Scripps, we recently synthesized a human antibody in the lab that neutralized the toxic effects of snakes worldwide. This work was featured on the cover of Science Translational Medicine, a highly reputable journal, which showcased a snake photograph I captured (see below). We also have several additional antibodies in development targeting other medically important snake species in India and globally.