Tim Friede

Director of Herpetology

Tim Friede is an autodidact herpetologist and venom expert. Almost twenty years ago, while collecting a home collection of venomous snakes, Tim began self-administering diluted venom as a means of establishing immunity in case he was ever bit accidentally. Over the course of nearly 20 years, he self-administered over 700 escalating doses of snake venom from the world’s deadliest snakes, culminating in the ability to be bitten by cobras, taipans, black mambas, rattlers and other venomous snakes and survive (he has now been bitten over 200 times). Realizing that he had achieved a level of hyperimmunity that was unusual for a human, he began reaching out to the therapeutic community asking to be researched in order to generate a universal antivenom. In 2017 he and Jacob Glanville were put in contact, and begun the collaboration that has ultimately given rise to the successful discovery of dozens of broad-spectrum anti-venom antibodies from his blood and the awarding of a National Institute of Health SBIR award to develop the polyclonal as the world’s first fully human broad-spectrum antivenom.