One-pot nanobody production of a broad-spectrum antivenom

Snakes produce a myriad of toxic compounds. That makes developing antivenoms a challenge, as they need to neutralize several of these compounds. Last year, a group of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark, by combining eight nanobodies, were able to produce a broadly neutralizing antivenom that was effective against cobras, mambas, and rinkhals.

But cost-effective and scalable production of the antivenom presents another challenge. Now that same group has shown that several of their venom-neutralizing nanobodies can be produced by Escherichia coli in a one-pot system that needs little downstream processing (Trends Biotechnol. 2026, DOI: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2026.02.022).

Anne Ljungars, an antibody scientist at the Technical University of Denmark who has been working on the antivenom research, says, “Snake bites mainly affect poor countries. So [the antivenom] needs to be a really inexpensive product.”

Ljungars says the team created six different E. coli cell lines that each produced a single venom-targeting nanobody and grew those cell lines in one vessel. This led them to get the nanobodies at approximately the concentrations they needed, without the use of expensive tools.

“So if we want to have 10 times more of one nanobody compared to another, we get roughly that,” Ljungars says. “And the thing with snake bites is that it doesn’t need to be exact. . . . The snake venoms will vary between different snakes anyway, and the snakes will also inject different amount of venom between one bite and another bite.”

This low-cost, one-pot nanobody production system gets close to producing a complete antivenom product, but it’s not quite ready to be bottled and distributed. “What was done in this study is a one-step purification using the tag of the nanobody. If we’re talking a real product, then it needs to be a tag-free purification,” Ljungars says. “To fully comply with regulatory recommendations, it needs to be improved further.”